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You might want to check out lora devices like Meshtastic.

This is interesting, thank you! It seems like LoRa operates in the UHF frequencies, and is an encoding scheme for data packets...? Does that encoding system also affect its usable range, or can any two radios in the same frequency generally send/receive over those distances?

A 50kb/s bit rate is fast enough for texting, but I guess it'd take some specialized voice protocols to do a walkie-talkie over that.

Regardless, thank you for sharing.

You can trade range for bandwidth by playing with the spread factor, an encoding tunable: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#modem-...

But generally yes, latency is too high and bandwidth is too low for synchronous voice. The upside is that real-world performance often exceeds the range of analog UHF even at significantly lower frequencies, e.g. GMRS.

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