Walkie-talkies are back and they're perfect for festivals
The walkie-talkie was never over, over but recently it has been crackling back to louder life over the airwaves. Whether you’re slinging a two-way Nestling radio set into your backpack for a summer festival as a smartphone substitute, or aping Netflix’s Stranger Things, the surge in interest in the humble handset is striking.
“Year-on-year sales are up 15 per cent”, says Giles Toman, managing director of Amherst Walkie Talkie Centre in Kilburn. “In the summer in particular, our radio hire business goes crazy.”
The yearn for pared down analogue-but-instant communication is understandable. “Walkie talkies carry an old-fashioned spontaneity lost in the modern tech-saturated world”, says Ben Newbury, one of many Glastonbury-goers who packed a set to stay in touch with friends at this year’s festival. When telecoms base stations are overwhelmed by large crowd numbers, phone calls and texts using normal data plans, handsets can be impractical, and nigh on impossible to use. Most of us will have faced the unbearable agony of waiting four hours for a text to go through in a mobile blackspot — only for the phone to run out of juice.
That’s not the only benefit: “they are fantastically low-tech and easy to use. And therefore you can interfere with other people’s conversations...” Newbury points out. An eavesdropping element is part of a wider problem. Apple watches run a wildly popular Walkie Talkie app feature. List yourself as available to chat, then hold down the Talk button on your watch while you issue voice messages to friends, like WhatsApp voice notes. Endless fun. But the tech giant had to suspend the app briefly last week after identifying a backdoor that could — in theory — have been used to eavesdrop on conversations through microphones. Fear not: there are alternatives. Zello, pictured below, allows open communication across the world, with public channels on popular topics and for geographical areas (storm tracking is one example). Two Way, meanwhile, is a speedy way to make your own channel with no personal information collected.
Of course, the Stranger Things bounce has helped: the sight of Dustin stringing together a ham radio tugs at the nostalgic heartstrings. Save the world, buy a walkie-talkie. “The walkie-talkie is a different animal to a mobile phone because the technology is truly instant”, says Toman. “It doesn’t rely on anyone else’s network or anyone else providing a service. If you’re cycling 50 miles out of London on a weekend, which isn’t uncommon, chances are you’ll be heading down little country lanes, losing phone coverage because you’re in the middle of nowhere.
“Then you can just press one button and talk to all your mates” And also, they’re fun. Embrace your inner child, save the world, and downgrade to a walkie-talkie.
