I think its been several years since I joined and made my first (and at this
point, other) post, but figured I'd
drop in. While my exploits in the
theatre have slowed to a crawl, I do now work with a robotics competition where we use Mumble as a comms solution to handle queuing of teams on and off the fields, separate channels for staff in different areas, and other features that we've now grown to depend on. We ditched the walki-talkies for the reasons already stated in the thread and haven't looked back.
Some interesting perspectives about mumble stability: The most recent competition I was at I had the good fortune to have access to some very high end RF test gear (a keysight fieldfox if you're curious) where we
identified over 500 discrete RF sources while walking around. These were all in the 2.4 and 5Ghz bands, but predominately in the 2.4Ghz band. To be
clear, these were sources operating in infrastructure mode; I estimate there were easily another 2k
cell phones sitting on the building's distributed antenna
system. The entire time I was talking on a
headset plugged into a cheap android phone and my signal did not
drop. Our wireless solution was the classic Linksys 54G
router, which was sitting at one end of the roughly hockey-rink sized
arena. I had good voice quality the entire time, the
system was stable, and we did not have serious issues in keeping it running over a 4 day continuous interval. We operated the
system with at peak 45 simultaneous voices on the
line and the server remained lightly loaded. While we were using a Linux laptop to host the server, a Pi could easily handle this load (Mumble just routes streams, it doesn't do any real processing on them).
I've also done the Pi route for testing, but since I help maintain a Linux distribution I've been willing to do some more... interesting... things with my
system images. Right now I've got it down to a 15 second boot before the server is available and I'm almost happy with that, but I'd like to get it a little faster.
Bottom
line: If I was back working with a high school/middle school group tomorrow with no budget and a
stage in a gym, I would not bother with telephone based intercoms or even the surprisingly cheap Que-Com
system, I'd bring a junk laptop and a wifi
router.