UKH

I keep getting adverts for Milo Action Communicators:

https://store.okmilo.com/en-GB/

Has anyone tried them? They look like a big improvement over ordinary walkie-talkies for communicating on multi-pitch climbs, especially sea cliffs. Completely hands-free, and natural two-way conversations without pressing buttons and all that "over" nonsense. But the price!

Not used them personally and an interesting ruggedised design but I'd note they're ISM frequency band not UHF like standard walkie talkies. That gives them more bandwidth (and regulatory freedom) for digital modulation and coding stuff (though I'd assume they're using off the shelf wireless IOT hardware rather than anything too custom).

However it'll also make them inherently shorter range, they claim "up to 600m" but that'll be seriously compromised when not line-of-sight. They make a thing about "ad hoc mesh networking" which is retransmitting around a group to extend the effective range, but that obviously won't help if it's just you and a partner!

I have a set of four that i bought as a backer of the original kickstarter project.  from the limited use i've had of them (2 young kids are preventing me getting out much), they work pretty well, although as suggested above, range decreases significantly if line of sight is interrupted by a great big lump of rock

Which of course is exactly the situation where climbers might find radios useful.

Hard to get around that fact of physics unfortunately. Although maybe with these you could park a spare one nearby as a repeater, if there's somewhere close enough with a clear view!

i've not tried that, but in theory it would work

Is there any noticeable delay in the transmission? That was my main concern when reading that it was digitally processed. Apart from the "up to 600m" range of course, which probably means a realistic 200m.

I do like the idea of a walkie talkie with some decent signal processing and noise reduction. You can do amazing stuff with microphones now that make speech much more intelligible in poor conditions.

Very little lag, maybe half a second max. You can certainly talk freely without constantly talking over the other people.

The sound processing is pretty effective for cancelling wind noise

surely a feature of this technology is that you could leave an extra device away from the rock with a less obstructed view of the climbing pair?

edit - should have read your later post!

not only should it work I thought it was one of the intentions of mesh