So here ' s the situation . You ' re comparing emergency service communications to I assume a commercial radio station . Radio stations put out power in the kilowatts range . That ' s a hell of a lot . A Motorola walkie talkie you can buy at Wal Mart puts out power of something like half a watt . They sacrifice voice quality for portability . Both the receiver and transmitter need to have a special circuit in them to help clean up the signal quality . In a commercial radio this is very important and requires a lot of power because you want to hear music and all the different tones . In voice communications , the importance is simply getting your message across and saving your battery . So sound quality is sacrificed for transmit distance and voice quality . They often set up relays within cities to deal with the issue of line of sight which is important for VHFUHF communications . The signal will not go through buildings without a huge amount of power . think a dropped cell phone call in an elevator . To get around the relatively poor sound quality , users typically use something like the NATO phonetic alphabet . alpha bravo Charlie etc . If you ' ve ever forced your radio in your car to stay on when the engine isn ' t running , you ' ll know that you will need a boost after 1020 minutes . That ' s a huge 12 volt battery . These guys need to carry their radios for their whole shift without plugging them in . Does that answer your question ?