At BarCampMilwaukee2 we had FRS radios, and I fear we had way too much fun with them, I mean, in addition to actually using them for their intended purpose, to communicate effectively within the space we had available to us.
Last year I had thought that FRS radios would come in handy as an ad-hoc public address system. Well, we had a real PA this year, so we used the radios as needed, and for finding each other, and for screwing around. Actually, they were quite useful, as we were in a building with doors that were occasionally locked and you often needed someone to let you in, or when you just had to know where Ashe was.
While out on the Photo Walk session (aka mil[photo]waukee) and scaling the roof of a certain fortress, we were able to alert Gabe that he should come outside and wave to us.
Yay for radios and geeks who are nerds when it comes to using them. I even hear that Gabe plans to return my radio at the next Web414 Meeting…
Things like letting everyone know when sessions were starting or when lunch arrived, or even just trying to find someone in Bucketworks, would have been easier with an intercom system. We could have done something as simple as put an FRS radio in each session room to alert people as to what was going on. (Sadly, I had three radios with me, but didn’t think of it at the time.) I know at least a few times I had to stop sessions from running over their time (only because the space was needed by others) or had to let people know that the session would need to end in 2 minutes.