Walkie Talkies -- Talking With Different Brands

[clamum]

My mom works at the State Fair each year and they have walkie talkies they use to communicate on the fairgrounds. I asked her which brand they were and she thought they were Motorola ones, but she wasn't sure. But she said they're nothing fancy, just standard "walkie talkies."

She's asked me to look at getting some walkie talkies for her people (the people under her don't have any; other departments/groups of people have them) and would want them to work with the existing walkie talkies in use there. So I've looked on Amazon and while it seems like they'd be able to talk to each other with the two different walkie talkies, I don't really know.

She specially mentioned these Arcshell walkie talkies as ones she was looking at getting and was wondering if they'd be able to communicate with the existing (possibly Motorola) walkie talkies there.

Does anyone here have any knowledge of walkie talkies and thinks that these would be able to talk to the ones they're using there? I'd guess that the Motorola (or whatever brand) ones they're already using may have more channels than these Arcshell ones, but if I had to guess I'd say they at least share some bandwidth/frequency. But I don't know.

Any help would be awesome!

 

[sdifox]

I don't think there is inter brand compatibility since they have encryption.

Can't she take a picture?

 

[lxskllr]

You need the model# of what she's using now. There's a limited number of possible bands, but they could be incompatible. Motorola probably makes all the systems, so you can't go by brand.

 

[gorobei]

you need to know what model. if they are professional models then you are out of luck. but....

most likely the units are just cheapo FRS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Radio_Service

in which case any brand of FRS wt will work fine, you just need to get everyone on the same channel (just cycle thru the 22 channels until everyone is on the same one).

 

[lxskllr]

in which case any brand of FRS wt will work fine, you just need to get everyone on the same channel (just cycle thru the 22 channels until everyone is on the same one).

and never choose the default. Everybody gets on channel 1. I used to choose 6 or 7 when I was using them. I think... Might have been 3 or 4. Dunno, but anything but 1.