Motorola is building a new kind of walkie-talkie for first responders
The higher-tech device could free up dispatchers for true emergencies—because you’d rather have a person answering 911 calls than looking up license plates.
Smartphones are handy devices, but they don’t do much good in emergencies. If a hurricane knocks down a few cell towers, or forest fires tear through the already thin infrastructure of remote areas, cell-phone communication can simply disappear. Which is why, to this day, first responders like police officers and firefighters rely on LMR, or “land mobile radios” (aka walkie-talkies). Walkie-talkies have a range of a few miles and are used to coordinate everything from routine information requests to dispatch to deep-disaster response inside a crumbling building.
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