[mugwump]

There has been a price revolution in handheld ham transceivers (requires a ham no-Morse technician’s license or better). The latest generation of Chinese handheld dual band (2m/70cm) transceivers match the Japanese Yaesu and Icom models feature for feature at a fraction of the cost. For example, I just purchased a BaoFeng UV5RE Plus off of Amazon for less than $40 delivered. If you’re willing to go the Ebay route I think you can get them for less than $35. The user’s manual is unintelligible chenglish, programming the presets manually is a total pain and it won’t take a 3 min, 3m bath like the Yaesu can and still survive. That said, it’s the bomb, otherwise. I’ve been having great luck using it even in hilly, forested terrain.

Note that you can get yourself in trouble using the UV5RE. Freqs that you shouldn’t have access to (and people put a lot of effort into accessing via circuit surgery in the high-end HTs) are available out of the box. You can transmit on GMRS, FRS, and MURS frequencies at full power--4W-5W depending on who’s doing the testing. (That’s against all the rules for those freqs and according to FCC device certification you’re not even supposed to have access to all of those on the same transceiver.) It includes a Sanyo scrambler chip that is normally found in wireless phones. Using this feature is optional and can be assigned on a frequency basis, but even so voice scrambling on ham bands isn’t legal, either. The no-no list goes on.

All that said, if you pay attention and have a tech license you can use all of the (legal) frequencies and features without violating FCC regs. For example, you can program a FRS preset and specify it uses the appropriate low power setting with no scrambling—perfectly legal. It has scanning capability (2 freqs/sec vs. 100/sec in a dedicated scanner and no trunk-tracking, but still, it scans), accessories are dirt cheap (battery packs, speaker mics--$9 wtf?, AAA and AA packs, antennas, 12v adapters, etc) and there is a large pool of users to smooth out the bumps (accessory modification advice, some guy wrote a ridiculously good user manual, etc.). And there is an outstanding free program called CHiRP that gets around the convoluted manual programming of presets by allowing everything to be entered into a spreadsheet and uploaded to the device—but you’ll need a $7 programming cable (everything associated with these things is inexpensive).

Check them out, there’s tons of stuff on Google. Be aware that there are a boatload of different versions (some of the older ones can be had for $15, new!) and some of the early teething problems are solved in the later models. Search for UV5RE Plus…I’d start w/ the Amazon reviews.