The 2 Best Walkie-Talkies of 2025

Top pick

This reliable and easy-to-use radio is rugged enough to go pretty much anywhere, and it offers excellent range and battery life.

The Rocky Talkie Mountain Radio set of walkie-talkies was a standout in our testing, both in range and in more subjective evaluations such as ruggedness, ergonomics, and usability. These handsets consistently ranked among the best performers in every test I ran, they were easy to set up and use, and they lasted through every camping trip and hike I took them on with plenty of battery to spare.

They have great range, even in challenging conditions. The Rocky Talkie radios were troupers throughout all of our outdoor adventures. They consistently delivered a solid signal that allowed us to communicate easily, whether I was chatting with someone across a busy cityscape or checking in with companions while hiking through forests.

Their carabiner clips offer a solid connection point. The integrated carabiner clips—one set into the rubber case of the handset and the other attached to a springy cord—are convenient for hooking your radio onto a backpack, a vest, or any other sort of loop on your gear.

The radio isn’t quite as convenient if you hook it on a belt loop, which keeps the speaker and microphone far away from your mouth and ears, but other walkie-talkies’ belt clips presented the same issue, and we preferred the flexibility of the carabiners.

If you drop them, they bounce right back. This handset is made of a hard plastic encased in a rubber outer shell that protects the radio well. The Rocky Talkie radios also have an IP56 rating, so they’ll hold up well in rainy, snowy, or otherwise wet conditions but shouldn’t be fully submerged in water.

They’re simple to use, and it’s hard to accidentally change settings. Instead of positioning the controls on the face of each handset, as on most radios we tested, Rocky Talkie placed two rubberized buttons on the side for changing volume and setting privacy codes, in addition to the large push-to-talk button above those and a rocker switch at the top.

With this arrangement, almost every button press has to be intentional. It prevents accidental channel switching, a problem that we had with a few other models we tested. The rocker switch at the top is particularly good at preventing accidental presses, but it’s also a bit harder to operate (though not impossible) while you’re wearing big, bulky gloves. We don’t mind that trade-off—we’d rather work a bit harder in gloves than change channels by mistake.

They offer a long-lasting battery and convenient USB-C charging. The Rocky Talkie radios lasted more than four days in our standby test, and they held up well in real-world situations, dropping only to about a 60% charge after a three-day camping trip.

These walkie-talkies charge via USB-C, and you probably already own an appropriate cable and charger (for your smartphone or another device) that you can use with them, in addition to the cable and plug that ship with each radio. We prefer this kind of charging to the dedicated charging cradles that a lot of the other tested models come with.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

• They’re expensive. At $220 per pair or $110 each when sold individually, these walkie-talkies will eat into your outdoor-gear budget.
• They don’t provide access to NOAA weather reports. That’s a disappointing omission considering their price. We tested several other, cheaper walkie-talkies that do offer this capability.
• They don’t have VOX support. We generally didn’t use voice-activated operation on the radios that featured it, but we’d still like to see it included for additional versatility. VOX allows you to send signals without pushing a button, relying on the microphone to detect your speaking and transmitting the message accordingly. This feature could be useful in situations where holding the handset and pushing the transmit button may be inconvenient, such as when you’re in the middle of rock climbing or carrying things around a campsite, but that situation didn’t come up often for us.