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"Uh, 10-4 Pig-Pen, what's yer 20? Omaha?!"

Anybody who has used a Two-Way Radio, or even a walkie talkie,note  knows that there are certain rules. You need to wait until the other person is finished talking (thus the reason for the oft-lampooned "Over"). There are range limits. Two people talking at once sounds like garbage. While there are plenty of frequencies,note  and you need to coordinate which one you'll be on, other people use them too. Sometimes people aren't sitting right next to the radio, or don't have it turned on, so they won't reply immediately.

In Hollywood Science, radios are basically telephones: when you talk into the radio, the radio has at least as much range as you need, the person you want is on the line—and just them, unless the plot requires someone to eavesdrop. You can interrupt conversations, talk over someone else, and everybody hears you just fine. Sometimes two people can be heard at once. Except for a little well-timed Walkie-Talkie Static, everything is perfectly clear.

Named for the most common culprit, the Citizens' Band (CB) radio. This appears to be entering Forgotten Trope territory with the advent of smartphones and the Internet - in particular, Twitter has been touted as the spiritual successor to CB.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • A set of regional commercials for Old Home Bread during the 70s featured C. W. McCall as a truck driver of the same name who regularly stops at the Old Home Fill Er Up and Keep on Truckin Cafe, where he makes sure to have some Old Home Bread with his meal and flirt with Mavis the waitress. These commercials would tell stories about McCall and Mavis, and since he was a trucker, and this was the C.B. radio boom, the stories would often involve McCall's CB radio. McCall would later have a top 40 radio hit with the song "Convoy", which tells a similar story, though without the bread commercial. And that would later be turned into a film.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Justified with the "cell phone" in Dr. STONE, since it's the only wireless communications system in the stone world. Plus it was designed by Senku, and both ends have an antenna in a high-up place to get enough range.

    Films — Animation 
  • In The Rescuers, when Bernard talks to Orville via CB, the communication happens without him pressing any call button.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In Airplane!, the conventions of the aircraft radio are played with by giving names to the flight crew that resemble common words used over the radio. The captain's last name is Oveur, the copilot's first name is Roger, and the navigator's first name is Victor. This leads to the captain saying, "what?" every time another crew member says "over" overnote  the radio, the copilot saying, "what" every time somebody says "Roger", and the navigator saying "what?" when asked to check a vector.
  • Die Hard:
    • Averted. McClane gets a bad guy's walkie-talkie, and talks to Al the policeman, and it's made clear that the bad guys can hear everything he's saying, hence why he goes by "Roy" instead of using his real name.
    • Also played straight on several occasions where a character interrupts someone else over the radio. This is quite simply not possible to do.
  • Erin's Guide to Kissing Girls: After school one day, Erin talks to Liz over their walkie-talkies to try and smooth things over with her over forgetting to buy the by-then sold out Wonder Woman tickets.
  • In Live Free or Die Hard, McClane uses the bad guy's CBs to contact the FBI. He knew the correct frequency and had a world-class amateur hacker working for him In a World… where hacking can do goddamn everything.
  • Smokey and the Bandit:
    • Averted as Bandit and Snowman also were seen to be working out an agile-comms plan (switching from channel to channel) to avoid police monitoring just after the Trans-Am was driven out of Snowman's trailer before they set off towards Texas. "What channel are we on" is asked by Bandit to Frog (Sally Field) before unit-to-unit comms commences. Also note that Sheriff Justice speaks into a different mic when talking other police officers, than when talking to The Bandit.
    • Yet still played straight in many aspects. Snowman and Bandit discuss switching channels to avoid police eavesdropping, which appears to work, but whenever Sheriff Justice or any other random trucker want to get in touch with Bandit, they are always on the channel he is listening to at the moment.
      • Channel 19 was a de-facto calling channel - Bandit-Snowman comms was on whatever channel they were operating on - but Bandit hailed Mr B's tanker on channel 19 33 seconds in. It was common to maintain a listening watch on Ch19 (similar to marine units always listening on marine band ch16 (which is de jure, not de facto)).
  • Everybody in The Cannonball Run seems to have their CB radio tuned to the same frequency. Possibly the racers had agreed to a specific frequency before the race started, but also they have no trouble communicating with plenty of random truck drivers during the race. Relatively justified since in the CB heyday channel 19 was a de facto standard for truckers on the interstate; there were exceptions for specific routes but they were pretty well known. Maybe they simply stayed on 19, or changed to 19 when they wanted to talk to a trucker.
  • In the first Tremors movie, the people of Perfection use a CB radio to warn the Gummers of impending Bad Things possibly coming their way. Actually justified in this case, since it's made clear that they can't reach anyone outside their valley with their CBs, and it would make sense for everyone to use the same frequency.
  • In Frequency, John and Frank can communicate via their ham radios without keying the microphone to speak. This is handwaved by the radios being magically connected via the Aurora Borealis. This "easy talk" setup is necessary to ensure that the climactic fight scenes in the room can unfold without losing the radios connection.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Dukes of Hazzard — Anybody could pick up his CB and call anyone, and that person was on that frequency.
  • The walkie talkies on Lost — The signal can travel long distances (even to a nearby island.)
  • Memorably subverted in The Young Ones, in which Neil is instructed to make the static noises himself when using his police walkie talkie.
  • In Hogan's Heroes The prisoners of Stalag 13 take advantage of a one-way version of this—when their plot involves "leaking" information to Klink and Schultz, they sometimes wire up the bug in the lamp and talk amongst themselves while letting the information "slip" (sometimes complete with badly written scripts). When they do this, Klink and Schultz are always sitting right next to the radio receiver, listening intently. Hogan refers to this as "calling room service".
  • Daredevil (2015): In "Condemned", Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk have a lengthy conversation over two-way police radios (Matt is using the radio taken off a police officer he overpowered, and Fisk is using a police radio supplied by James Wesley). Fisk also has the corrupt cops in his pocket clear a channel (under the pretense of the channel needing to be used for the ESU team) explicitly so he can converse with Matt without interruptions. These are call-and-response radios, but neither Matt nor Fisk are ever shown or heard actuating the call buttons. They speak as if they are talking on cell phones.
  • Averted in Stranger Things, where in season 3 Dustin gets everyone to carry an extremely strong radio antenna onto a high Hill to have enough range to talk to his girlfriend... only for her not to be at the radio.
  • The Mandalorian: Subverted with the comlink when Mando calls Kuiil on it, the scout troopers are able to pick up the broadcast. Note that due to the futuristic setting (and no real official word on how Star Wars communication tech works), it might have been plausible for some kind of handheld communication device to have some encryption or privacy that would prevent or hinder third parties from intercepting the signal, but here the comlink is treated as a conventional radio, where anyone can listen in.

    Music 
  • The C. W. McCall song "Convoy" and the film it spawned. It also inspired several parodies/imitators.
    • "yovnoC" by Cledus Maggard. A group of truckers drive 55 MPH just to see what would happen. At the climax, Jimmy Carter talks to them on their CBs.
    • "CB Savage" by Rod Hart. Two truckers hear a Camp Gay on their radio, and by the end of the song they find it was a Smokey disguising his voice to catch them speeding.
    • "Colorado Call" by Shad O'Shea and the 18 Wheelers. Truckers hear a sexy female voice on CB inviting them to visit her. We're led to assume she's involved in The Oldest Profession, but it turns out she was just a waitress advertising a diner.

    Video Games 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: This takes use of Video Phones that are only picked up by both receivers and only audible to whoever is being contacted.
  • Your radio in BioShock is automatically tuned to Atlas's radio frequency the second you pick it up, and other people (Like Sander Cohen or Andrew Ryan) can easily tune in, jam your connection and talk to you.
  • Metal Gear:
    • Metal Gear Solid
      • The "Codec" supposedly puts the sound straight into your earbones so only you hear the person talking to you (with ample opportunity for Fridge Logic, considering the speaker's own voice should still be very audible to their surroundings - this becomes particularly ridiculous in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, where characters standing barely two feet away from one another will decide to switch to nanocommunications for privacy). Plus, despite supposedly being an audio-only device, the HUD displays it almost like a videophone. On top of that, you have a number of people whose frequencies you have to find.
      • The "speaker's own voice" issue could probably be Hand Waved by invoking subvocalization — methods of turning it into audible speech have appeared in science fiction at least as far back as The Caves of Steel.
    • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty DOES make it clear that switching to nano-communication involves lip-movement only, what they say is inaudible to observers, as demonstrated by Ocelot's surveillance of Raiden and Ames.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater's radio was essentially the same as the above Codec, though it also worked around the "speaker's own voice" issue by having Snake communicating back to Mission Control via a throat mike.
  • Penumbra Overture does this with Red, who simply buzzes in and doesn't use any form of radio lingo or protocol while talking to you. Justified in that the guy's batshit insane by now and given that Philip never vocally says a word to him, Red isn't even exactly sure you're there sometimes, or so he says.
  • The walkies in Tomb Raider (2013) are treated as functionally identical to cellphones. Characters are routinely able to interrupt each other. Lara's party has clearly never heard of "radio silence", and will often freely broadcast their location, despite being surrounded by enemies who are searching for them and could easily be listening in. The only consideration for range is when they try to transmit off the island, which Lara does by climbing a radio tower and using the two-way radio built into the top. When she does, she hears a signal being transmitted on nonstop loop from a rescue plane, which she interrupts, despite neither of those things making even a little sense. Additionally, when the rescue plane answers her distress call (interrupting Lara), the rest of her crew can hear it on their radios, despite being out of range and almost certainly being on different frequencies.

    Web Animation 
  • In the Strong Bad Email "lunch special", Strong Bad and The Cheat are shown using ancient, 1940s-era walkie-talkies (as befits Strong Bad's Disco Dan traits when it comes to technology).

    Western Animation 
  • Hanna-Barbera's CB Bears were three ursine detectives who operated from a garbage truck and received assignments from "Charlie" via C.B. radio.
  • An episode of Steven Universe has Pearl communicating with Steven and Connie via walkie-talkie. At one point she calls them and gets no response, and says "Hello? Anyone there? I'm just going to keep talking until somebody answers!" It's uncertain if the error was Pearl's or the writer's.
  • In the Adventure Time episode "Jake The Brick", Finn leaves a walkie-talkie for Jake so that they can keep in touch while Jake is transformed into a brick in a wall (it... almost makes sense in context...). Jake spends the whole episode with the walkie on "speakerphone", able to transmit without pushing the button, and send and receive simultaneously. The episode also clearly establishes a long distance between Finn and Jake (a half-day's hike, so around 10-15 miles) through hills and forests, which would likely put them outside the walkie's effective range.

"This here's the Rubber Duck on the side—We gone, Bye, Bye..."

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