Two Way Radio Hire for Events, Festivals & Productions

The 80 public UHF CB channels are open to anyone and need no licence. They are also open to every other operator within range, which on a busy event site means market stallholders, neighbouring contractors and passing trucks all sharing your airtime.

Private frequencies are licensed by the ACMA and only your fleet uses them. When you hire from us, the radios go out on our apparatus licence for the period of the event, so there is no application for you to lodge and nothing to renew afterwards. If you buy a fleet instead, we arrange the licence in your own name.

The number depends on the site and the structure of your crew, so we will not quote a figure without seeing the run sheet. The method is the same every time: list the roles that must be contactable within seconds, then add radios for the supervisors who move between them.

In practice that usually means every security position, each gate, each bar or catering lead, stage and production leads, site and traffic marshals, the medical point and the event control desk. Casual staff who work in fixed pairs can often share one radio between them.

Send us the site plan and the departmental breakdown and we will come back with a fleet count and a channel plan you can sign off.

Hire stock is finite and event calendars cluster. Summer weekends, the spring racing and festival run, and the end of year corporate season all draw on the same fleet, so the earlier you have a booking in the system the better.

Getting in early also buys time for the part that improves the event: working out the channel plan, sizing accessories and, on larger sites, arranging a repeater. Short-notice bookings are worth asking about, because stock does come back between events. Check what is in the digital hire fleet and talk to us about dates.

Handsets talking directly to each other will cover a hall, a club or a small park. Spread the same crew across a racecourse, a showground, a multi-stage parkland site or a venue with basement loading and they will start losing each other.

The fix is a portable repeater placed at height for the run of the event. It receives every handset and retransmits at higher power, which lifts coverage across the whole footprint rather than just the middle of it. We hire the repeater with the fleet, install it during bump-in and remove it during bump-out. Read more about professional grade repeaters.

A fleet ships fully charged and programmed to your channel plan, numbered so it can be signed in and out against a department list. Multi-way chargers, spare batteries and audio accessories go with it, which means earpieces for security and front of house and speaker mics for crew working with their hands full.

Spares are included in the count so a dropped or damaged radio does not leave a position unstaffed. Anything you want beyond the standard kit, such as extra headsets for high noise areas or a specific carry option, is worth flagging when you book. Full details sit on the two way radio hire page.

This is the usual answer for touring productions and events split across venues. Crew on site carry conventional handsets. Tour managers, transport coordinators and anyone working the second venue run push-to-talk over 4G and 5G instead, on a dedicated device or on their own phone.

Both sit on the same talkgroup, so nobody has to relay a message between two systems. We configure the link as part of the hire and take it down when the fleet is collected. There is more detail on Motorola WAVE PTX.

Function centres, hotels, stadiums and conference venues that host events most weeks generally do better owning a permanent fleet and hiring in extra handsets for the big weekends. That way the house team keeps its own channels and the incoming production gets a matched set on top.

If you run a venue rather than an event, the hospitality page covers the permanent side of it, and the security page covers crowd and guarding teams. We often supply all three on the same site.