2 Way Radios or What For Communication?

We have two ways with our own private Chanel. Wouldn’t go without. The license is couple hundred a year not exactly sure.

Well.....we only have two mobiles and a base radio.......

We have a couple handhelds and they are nice for rental or demo machines so you can communicate with them. Or take in a pickup if your trouble shooting a machine driving down the field.

We use and depend on VHF radios. I forget how many individual licenses we have, but I recall that you have to have 3 base station licenses to have the frequency to yourself at your location, otherwise you end up sharing. And I believe the licenses are intended to cover operation in your area only (IE you can't legally use them on a road trip). We're slowly converting over to the new narrow-band radios as our old Midlands stop working.

I'm sure a lot of farms (perhaps most farms) just use cell phones these days. 99% of the time, that's probably good enough.

Also there are unlicensed GMRS radios that might benefit some, say at harvest time. Canada allows 2 watts unlicensed, and there are several channels to choose from, as well as squelch codes.

A good magnetic phone mount that keeps it in view and easy to pull off an reply to texts also makes communication more convenient

This topic has got me wondering, I am not sure if I am on UHF or VHF but the radios I have are supposed to work on either I believe. Have had two ways for quite a number of years and started out going with Midland and so had a pile of them and over half of them have crapped out and could no longer get parts for them. So in the last years when that had happened I've switched over to Kenwood ( of course a different mount and electric plug but the antenna plug is the same ) . The Kenwood model for anyone interested in basically the bottom of the heap and is a TK-7302H and yet has whatever functions I require but would not work in situations where a lot of frequencies/channels are required but not an issue on most farms. Cell service is crap here, between non existent in some spots to just barely working in other spots so not reliable fast communications at all. With a two way multiple people in multiple pieces of equipment are all able to communicate and get the message in an instant, wire each unit to come on with the turn of the key and the single frequency already set and so not a lot of input or planning is required. Its that up front cost to buy the units and used to do some swaps from pieces of equipment that would not be used at that moment in time with the Midland but the Kenwood I have does not have a friendly swap ability so the radios just stay in their respective vehicles/tractors/combines etc. Would be lost without them but I can see where a cell phone can work if there is reception and very limited amount of people are requiring to interact. And Kevlar as you brought up the harvest time of year, that is indeed when they really get used as more then one combine in a field and trying to keep things going rather then no one having a clue what and why the next person is doing what they are and getting disoriented in the dark, wondering where the next empty truck is, needing a grain cart and ... on and on.

We have vhf radios and get up to 25 miles at times. Sometimes more. It’s better north south range then east west. Works good for us as we have land 30 miles north of our yard but only 6 miles east is the farthest. I agree that a radio is far better then a cell phone while in the field with multiple people. Everybody can here what the plan is or ask a question and somebody can answer.

Those of you who are sharing a frequency with a neighbour need to ask your radio supplier about Continuous Tone-Coded Squelch Systems (CTCSS) or more commonly just "tone squelch". Modern radios are likely already capable of CTCSS. The way it works is your radio transmits an inaudible tone along with your voice transmission. The receiving set only opens its squelch when it detects the inaudible tone. So you can have multiple groups of radios using the same frequency yet only hearing their private group conversations. Obviously its still one frequency so you can't talk over each other - actually you can but it will be same as when someone walks on someone else and nobody hears anything. Its absolutely a workable solution for shared frequencies and it removes the annoyance of hearing your neighbour or worse, hearing a transmission from your neighbour and responding because you thinks its from one of your guys.