How far do two-way radios actually reach?

What actually determines range

• Height, more than anything else. Radio at these frequencies travels roughly line of sight. Getting an antenna up is worth more than any amount of extra power. A steward standing in a dip has a worse radio than the same steward on a gate ramp.
• What is in the way. Buildings, earth banks, hills and dense wet foliage all absorb signal. A brick wall costs you more than a hundred metres of open air. At Fortified the fort ramparts were the whole problem.
• Transmit power, but less than people think. Doubling power does not double range. It is a useful lever once height and siting are right, and close to useless before that.
• The antenna on the handset. The stubby aerial that makes a radio pocket-friendly also makes it worse at its job. This is a genuine trade and worth knowing you are making it.
• Where it is worn. A radio on a belt with the user between it and the far end loses real distance. Bodies are mostly water and water absorbs UHF.

Rough numbers, honestly caveated

Any specific figure is a lie without a site to attach it to, but as a starting point for thinking:

• Licence-free PMR446, half a watt: a few hundred metres through buildings or woodland, maybe a kilometre or two across open flat ground on a good day.
• Licensed business radio, a few watts with a better antenna: comfortably several times that in the same conditions. This is the difference people notice most.
• With a repeater on site: coverage stops being about handset-to-handset distance at all, because every radio talks to the repeater instead. On a large or awkward site this is usually the real answer.
• None of these survive contact with a specific valley, so treat them as a reason to survey rather than a substitute for one.

The question to ask instead of "how far"

Range is the wrong frame. What you actually need to know is whether every person who needs to hear a call will hear it, from wherever they will actually be standing, on the worst afternoon of your event.

That is a coverage question, not a distance one, and it has a different answer: walk the site, test from the far corners, and find the dead spots before your stewards do. It is also why we include a radio check in the build rather than handing over a box of handsets and hoping.

What to do about a site that does not cover

• Raise the antenna. Cheapest fix, biggest effect, and the one most often skipped.
• Add a repeater. One well-sited repeater usually beats any amount of fiddling with handsets.
• Go licensed. More power and cleaner frequencies, covered in the licensing guide.
• Split the problem. Sometimes the right answer is two channels and a relay point rather than one channel that nearly works.
• Accept a dead spot and plan around it. If one corner genuinely cannot be covered economically, the useful response is a procedure, not pretending it is covered.

Where this came from

We work a lot of woodland and heritage sites, which are the two environments that punish radio hardest. Bailwood is 250 people under tree cover; Fortified is inside Victorian brickwork. Those are the jobs where coverage planning stops being theoretical.

If you want this done for your site rather than estimated from a page, that is what radio hire includes.