Motorola T6222 (8 Channels) Two Way Radio

The Motorola T6222 is a very nice little PMR446 radio.
It was superceded by the slightly more professional XTL446.
Both radios are very similar, they share accessories but not chargers.

They can run from the standard small Motorola battery NTN9395A.
You can get three times the life from 3AA NIMH 2.5Ah cells.
This means that you get about three days of heavy use from one charge.
You will need to be able to charge three AAs at a time for one set.

Main features of these little (95x50x30mm) transceivers :-
1) Excellent Motorola companded audio. Also LOUD.
2) Scanning the 8 channels displays the CTCSS in use.
3) Very sensitive receiver, very few sets beat these.
4) Simple audio scrambling for a bit of extra privacy.
5) Lots of tones, beeps & whistles if you use these.

The charger is intelligent, it rapidly charges the battery in the set,
Then switches to a gentle trickle to top off the battery.

The audio companding system works in a similar way to the Power
Microphones that were popular with CBers.
On receive the audio is returned back to the way it sounded originally.

Listening to a Motorola set on another non companded type,
The Motorola will sound punchy & very clear.
Listening to another make on the T6222 will sound slightly muffled.
It is still very usable though.

The CTCSS scan is very unusual, no other set implements this well.
You have to be on a memory channel without CTCSS set for it to work.
If you start the scan from a memory with it set, the squelch will only
open when the CTCSS matches the one in the set.

These radios work well with the market leader the XTN446.
The scrambling system is compatible with one of the XTN446s options.

I should mention that these Motorola radios have a 60 second transmit timeout.
This means that you can't talk for longer than this in any "over"
In practice not a problem unless you plan to be quite wordy.

Overall these radios come highly recommended by me.