My favorite walkies (Motorola FV100) had to be replaced. One of the displays went but we were still able to use them...then one start complaining (chirp chirp) about a dead battery constantly even when fresh triple A's were installed. I headed to Home Depot at lunch to pick some up for the job we were working on. HD employee says "we don't carry those" but we found them in the electronics area anyway lol.

The HD cheapo motorolas worked okay at first. They are 3 times the size of the ultra mini FV100's with apx the same range. After a week of use one of the mics is dead. I am going to return them to HD today and get another set that will probably fail in a week.

So...

Where do i go from here? I need something small but durable. I need just enough range for a 10,000 sqft house. Both sets of these consumer motos work fine in this application. I prefer something that lets me use normal batteries so i am not a slave to the charging station. I don't have room for docking stations in my tool bag and i don't like having to remember to put them on a charging cable every day. I also want something rubberized. The 2 sets i have are hard plastic consumer grade.

I can always just keep buying $20-40 sets and throwing the bad ones out every week but it would be nice to have a decent set for a while. The walkies in my primary tool bag have been working for 10 years. They are consumer motos but they have rubber edges/grips and can take the impact when dropped. The newer models arent as tough.