How to lose yourself in the wild without getting lost

The XRS-660 does have a GPS receiver, but it’s not a powerful one (it doesn’t support Glonass, for instance, and in our tests it often refused to report a GPS location when our Glonass-enabled smartphone would give us a fix accurate to within 15 metres or better), and there’s no mapping or navigation software in it.

But that’s the point of this device.

The GPS is used as an adjunct to the main function of the XRS-660, which is first and foremost a highly featured handheld CB radio that (at its simplest) is straightforward to use.

The thing has a whopping great on-off-cum-volume dial on the top, and to make it go you just turn that dial, push the Push To Talk (PTT) button on the left side, and talk.

It does the things you might expect a full-fledged handheld radio to do, like:

• scanning through the 80 public UHF channels automatically so you can listen for any conversations in range, not just the conversation on the frequency your party has chosen to use;
• allowing you to tune to commercially licensed analogue frequencies, so you can hear what local SES or rural fire services are saying (hopefully not about you);
• offering a range of transmission power options, up to the maximum legal power of 5 Watts;
• offering a “scrambler” mode, that makes your transmissions unintelligible to anyone who doesn’t also have their CB set to scramble;
• offering power-saving modes that extend the battery life out to weeks at a time, obviously depending on how much it’s used.

With GPS and Bluetooth turned off and with power-saving modes set to maximum, GME says you can get 64 hours of usage from a single charge, assuming 90 per cent of the time it’s in standby mode, 5 per cent of the time it’s transmitting and 5 per cent of the time it’s actively receiving.

Typically, it would be transmitting and receiving far less than that, and providing you remember to turn it off at night, those 64 hours could stretch out to weeks.

We’d like to have seen a USB-charging option for the XRS-660, so you could travel without the fairly bulky charging dock, but given the battery life you ought to be able to travel without any charger for most adventures, so it’s not a major criticism.

Anyway, on top of being a proper, ruggedised walkie-talkie, it also has this GPS feature known as “XRS” that’s proprietary to GME, which appends a data packet containing your GPS location, your username and your status to the end of every voice transmission.

Then, when you talk to someone who also has a GME XRS radio (and there are more than 400,000 of them in Australia alone), and who has their radio paired to the “XRS Connect” app on their mobile phone, your location will come up as a pin on the topological map inside their app.

And vice versa on your app, too, when they reply. GME lets you cache the topo maps onto your phone, so the mapping still works even when the phone has no connection, provided you’re somewhere you anticipated you would be.

It’s simple, but it works well.

Indeed, you don’t even need to talk to someone to send them your location. You can just blip the PTT button momentarily, and any XRS user in range who’s tuned to or scanning your frequency will get your location.

That’s how we tested the range of XRS-660. We left one unit paired to a phone and sitting outside our Digital Life Labs by The Mountain office, then drove off in a car through the mountains, holding the other unit out the car window and blipping its PTT button every hundred metres or so.

The farthest pin drop was 7.1 kilometres distant as the crow flies; which would give you a rescue footprint of 158 square kilometres should you be lost, broken down or injured somewhere, blipping away with your status set to “HELP!” and/or tuned to a reserved rescue frequency.

(The XRS-660 does have a feature that shows your GPS location on its screen, too, in case you’re talking to a non-XRS user and need to read out your coordinates.)

Technically, though, UHF radio has a “line of sight” range, so you could get a little more than that from the XRS-660 (maybe 10 kilometres or more if you’re on top of a bare hill and transmitting with the maximum 5-Watt power setting), or indeed you could get a lot less than that if you’re stuck in a ditch somewhere, or in a densely wooded area.

But the way we see it, even a short-range radio cry for assistance is better than yelling.

Save your voice for when you get home safely, and have one hell of a tale to tell.