By Dave Eames & Roman Phillips, Co-Founders of Black Diamond Radio
Budget Radios Create More Problems Than Solutions
When most people think of two-way radios, they think of emergency services, construction workers, and security guards. What many don’t know is that walkie-talkies are used daily in grocery stores, hotels, medical offices, car washes, restaurants, schools, animal hospitals, and many other industries. You’re here because you’ve already made this discovery. You had the savvy to see the potential in your team using two-way radios to communicate instantly, leading to gains in productivity and efficiency, and you transformed your facility’s workflow for the better.
What many folks don’t figure out as they go is that using consumer walkies instead of industrial units, or holding on to old, worn-out radios, can silently negate the time and money these devices save.
Cheap Radios from That Massive Online Retailer
We’re not going to invoke their name, but you know who we’re referring to. It’s a great marketplace with tons of cool stuff at reasonable prices and fast shipping. We all use it, and there’s nothing wrong with that; they’ve got some good stuff in their warehouses. What they don’t have is a good two-way radio. The brands available there are great for the frugal-minded individual who needs radios to talk to their buddies at the concert, or the ham-radio geek who needs a set of cost-effective units to futz around with. What they are not so great for is use in a business. Like with many things, you get what you pay for, and professional gear is rarely “cheap.” These consumer devices cost next to nothing to manufacture, which is why they are so inexpensive to you. You’re running a professional business—why equip it with what amounts to a kid’s toy?
Audio Quality
Audio quality in consumer radios is abysmal at best: tinny, ear-piercing, and often hard to understand. Many users have complained about having to constantly repeat themselves, which is fine on a rare occasion but can become taxing if you’re doing it every other call, day in and day out. Business-class radios eliminate 99 percent of this issue; rarely does a user repeat themselves on a business-class walkie. That simple fact alone makes consumer radios not worth the small price they charge, because you’re not getting what you’re after: saved time. You’re not buying radios; you’re buying efficiency and productivity. The goal is to buy time at a heavily discounted price. If you must repeat yourself, you might as well drop everything you’re doing and physically track down the person you’re talking to.
Dr. Glenn Vo, Editor-in-Chief of Dental Lifestyles Magazine, knows this firsthand:
“I was one of those Docs that used the cheap radios to save money. What ended up happening was that I was wasting time asking people to repeat themselves over and over again and constantly replacing the radios. Once I switched to Black Diamond Radios, it was as if my team and I removed ear plugs from our ears. We were able to hear each other more consistently but also communicate more effectively.”
Budget Earpieces
Consumer earpieces don’t just sound bad; they break very easily. They use wires that are not designed for longevity, lacking the strength and durability required to last. They’re built to function and make a sale; what happens after that is not the manufacturer’s concern unless it costs them money. Sadly, the lion’s share of customers say, “This is junk,” throw it in the trash, and eat the $10 loss, so the most cost-effective thing for many manufacturers to do is to ignore the needs of the customer beyond the sale.
Industrial-quality earpieces will sound great, offer maximum comfort, and have stapled strain relief, and top-level models will employ Kevlar-reinforced wiring. You can go through ten $10 earpieces in a year and burn through $100—spinning your wheels replacing them and waiting for them to arrive—or you can spend half that on one earpiece that will last for years.
Privacy and Legal Compliance
Consumer radios tend to use common frequencies and quiet tones, known as FRS and GMRS frequencies, that are illegal to use for business and are reserved by the FCC for the average citizen out hiking or on a family outing. Anyone can buy the same or similar radios you have and sit outside listening and cutting in. You’ll have better privacy and fewer interruptions with a business-class unit.
Digital radios, which are not offered on the marketplace above, are nearly impossible to listen to or cut in on. Most businesses want their communication to be private (or must comply with HIPAA!), and no one wants random transmissions when they’re trying to work and communicate. Business-class radios solve these problems.
Range
All FRS radios put out half a watt and will not properly cover a reasonably sized office or facility. Many consumer walkies advertise two or more watts, but in the realm of budget, that does not always indicate good range. The radio merely has to output two watts of power for the manufacturer to make that claim. It does not necessarily mean the radio has been optimized to make the most of those two watts. You’ll often find that a $20 two-watt radio cannot compete with the range of a $200 two-watt radio. Maybe the radio has a two-watt transmitter, but what receiver is it using? That two-watt transmitter isn’t terribly useful if the receiver at the other end is the cheapest one they could source. Lower-quality antennas, lower-quality circuitry—many factors affect range, not just power.
With industrial units, you can count on a proper receiver that maximizes the functionality of the two-watt transmitter, backed by circuitry built to support that goal. Professional walkie manufacturers tend to have a reputation to uphold, because they’ve served specific industries for decades, and the quality of their gear speaks for the brand and builds customer loyalty.
Durability
If the radios are not durable, you’re going to be replacing them faster than you can get any real productivity out of them. Businesses are very hard on walkies. They’re used eight to twelve hours a day, five to seven days a week. Consumer radios were not designed for that; they’re built for a few hours at the zoo or an occasional single-day hiking excursion.
Remember the earpieces? These are designed to make a sale and nothing beyond that. No one on the development team, no one on the design team, and no one on the manufacturing floor ever thought about whether their customers would still be using them three years after purchase. The only thing they thought about was, “How can we make this as absolutely cheap as possible yet still functional?” The radios likely come with a one- or two-year warranty that covers defects, but you’ll never actually be able to prove any defects or issues are their fault—another sales tactic.
Durability extends beyond “toughness,” too. What capacitors were used? What resistors were used? Where did they source their audio jacks? If the internal parts aren’t durable in addition to the chassis, the radio will quickly fail from basic, normal use.
Old Radios That You Hesitate to Replace
“But it still works!”
In everyday life, we stretch the life of equipment to save money, but for a business using walkies in a professional setting, this can be frowned upon by customers, clients, or patients, and it can negatively affect your daily communication. It can also lead to costly errors and slow everyone down, reducing productivity.
Unnoticed Performance Decay
Circuitry begins to fail with time. Capacitors don’t hold the charge they used to. Dust gets inside and slowly accumulates, resulting in more heat and less efficiency. Resistors start exhibiting resistance drift due to age. Knobs wear out, become crackly, or barely work well enough to justify keeping the radio in service—all of which slows the user down.
Five to seven years is the maximum recommended life span of a two-way radio in a business setting. It’s around that mark that returns diminish due to slowly dying circuitry, and dealing with walkie issues eats up all the time the radios had previously been saving. Many of these issues are practically invisible, and because they happen so slowly over time, they go unnoticed. Almost never do radios get replaced because someone made a smart decision; it usually happens when a radio fails on a super busy day. Avoid that bad day and replace the radio before it becomes a problem.
Long-Term Battery Life
Sadly, batteries don’t last forever. As time goes on, the battery holds less of a charge, until it eventually holds none. Batteries generally cost about one-quarter as much as a replacement walkie. Replacing them once is fine, but if you replace the battery a second time, you’ve now spent half of what it would cost to just replace the radio. If you replace the batteries four times, you’ve paid for a new radio—with all-new circuitry—that you never got to use. The sweet spot is to replace the battery one time and then replace the walkie when that battery dies. Batteries should last at least a year, but two to three years is not unheard of. On a good radio, that adds up to four to six years of solid service, and since five to seven years is the mark for recommended replacement, the failure of the second battery is the perfect reminder that it’s time to replace the walkie.
Structural/Mechanical Weaknesses
A radio with a durable aluminum chassis will hold up for a long time, but eventually the plastics and other materials used in the manufacturing process become weaker and easier to break or wear out. The plastics in the knobs, antenna, and housing aren’t as durable as they were when the radio was purchased. The mechanical parts, such as the knob internals, become weaker, and the “wear and tear” begins to accelerate. The walkie’s returns begin to silently diminish, completely unnoticed. It’s best to replace it before that point—before it starts creating more problems than it solves.
Silent Hardware and Firmware Revisions
Manufacturers often make small, unannounced changes to a product to improve it, especially in electronics. They might switch to higher-quality capacitors, or find that one transmitter works better than another and swap it in, or catch a minor, hardly noticeable fault in the firmware and correct it. Production electronics change regularly without our knowing, and the only way to tell is to take a unit apart or dissect the information saved on its chips. When users decide to replace a unit, they often get improvements they may not even know about and might never notice. Sometimes users will say a certain unit seems better than the others but can’t explain why. Tiny, incremental improvements happen that the team may sense but not consciously notice.
Now You Know!
As you can see, there is a hidden cost to using budget radios or trying to stretch old ones beyond their limit. Think of the time consumed solving issues, the time lost repeating yourself or futzing with a unit to get it working, and the money lost on replacement radios and earpieces. How about the time you called John at the other end of the building and he didn’t answer—because your radio no longer transmits, he never heard you, and you had no idea he didn’t? Time wasted. Implementing common-sense practices for replacing old units—and keeping consumer walkies out of your business—will position your company to maximize the true benefits of wireless push-to-talk communication!
