In What Countries Are FRS/GMRS Radios Usable ?

[heatherbrie]

In what countries are FRS/GMRS radios usable? In some countries (Spain?) they are the frequencies emergency services use, and are therefore prohibited. Any advice from folks who have been around?

[duncan_ellison]

I think you'll find that Canada is the ONLY territory where FRS / GMRS is legally usable outside the USA.

General Mobile Radio Service - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are some unlicenced frequencies available in Europe, but there is different channel spacing and channel assignments to FRS / GMRS.

If you want to use an unlicenced walkie talkie in Europe, buy a pair of local devices from any one of a number of electronics stores, they are pretty cheap.

Don't use your GMRS anywhere else, you might one day need one of the services you could be interfering with !

Duncan
S/Y TALISA

[goboatingnow]

in Europe , FRS is called PMR446 and uses a different set of frequencies as some of the FRS frequencies are used by the emergency services.

Dave

[capt_douglas]

Pretty much any country. Most countries don't have frequency police and it's nice to not have to worry about being jammed. As goboatingnow has commented, it's wise to give your freq/channel a listen for a while to make sure it's not used by emergency services.

[duncan_ellison]

Have to take issue with Cap Douglas here.

Just because you are unlikely to get caught using an illegal frequency with a non-type approved radio, that doesn't make it OK.

You are correct there are very few governmental agencies who are likely to be able to catch up with you, especialy with transitory, low power transmissions like a walkie talkie. But 'listening for a while', then going ahead to use the frequency isn't the right way IMHO.

A perfectly legal set of radios can be had in most of Europe for <$50, isn't that better than unintentionally coming up on a police / fire / ambulance channel and potentially jamming important traffic ?

Just my 10c

Duncan

[denverd0n]

I agree with you 100% Duncan. Just because you can probably get away with it, that does NOT make it "okay" to use an illegal transmitter that has a fair chance of interfering with emergency communications!