Can you hear a walkie talkie on a scanner?

Similar designs were created for other armed forces, and after the war, walkie-talkies spread to public safety and eventually commercial and jobsite work. Major characteristics include a half-duplex channel (only one radio transmits at a time, though any number can listen) and a "push-to-talk" (PTT) switch that starts transmission. Typical walkie-talkies resemble a telephone handset, possibly slightly larger but still a single unit, with an antenna mounted on the top of the unit.

Where a phone's earpiece is only loud enough to be heard by the user, a walkie-talkie's built-in speaker can be heard by the user and those in the user's immediate vicinity. Hand-held transceivers may be used to communicate between each other, or to vehicle-mounted or base stations. The first radio receiver/transmitter to be widely nicknamed "Walkie-Talkie" was the backpacked Motorola SCR-300, created by an engineering team in 1940 at the Galvin Manufacturing Company (fore-runner of Motorola).

The team consisted of Dan Noble, who conceived of the design using frequency modulation, Henryk Magnuski who was the principal RF engineer, Marion Bond, Lloyd Morris, and Bill Vogel. Motorola also produced the hand-held AM SCR-536 radio during World War II, and it was called the "Handie-Talkie" (HT). 1 The terms are often confused today, but the original walkie talkie referred to the back mounted model, while the handie talkie was the device which could be held entirely in the hand (but had vastly reduced performance).

Both devices ran on vacuum tubes and used high voltage dry cell batteries. (Handie-Talkie became a trademark of Motorola, Inc. Radio engineer and developer of the Joan-Eleanor system Alfred J.

Gross also worked on the early technology behind the walkie-talkie between 1934 and 1941, and is sometimes credited with inventing it. Also credited with the invention of the walkie talkie is Canadian inventor Donald Hings who created a portable radio signaling system for his employer CM&S in 1937 which he called a "packset", but which later became known as the "walkie talkie". Hings was formally decorated for its significance to the war effort.

34 Hing's model C-58 "Handy-Talkie" was in military service by 1942, the result of a secret R&D effort that began in 1940. Following World War II, Raytheon developed the SCR-536's military replacement, the AN/PRC-6. The AN/PRC-6 circuit uses 13 vacuum tubes (receiver and transmitter); a second set of 13 tubes is supplied with the unit as running spares.