Originally posted by CavemanJ
That's basically what the range channel is now. Not sure what the exact range is. But people don't appear in your range list until they come into icon range. Then they can go outside icon range a little bit and still hear you, but I'm not sure how far they can go and still hear you.
When you're in the tower range talks to the people in the tower with you.
In the air, the range channel is more analogous to text ch 2 than text ch 3. It hits everybody in con range whether they want to hear it or not. As such, it's just as subject to spamming as text ch 2.
The advantage of text ch 3 is that if you don't want to listen to it, you don't tune to that channel. This disadvantage of text ch 3 is that you might want to tell somebody near you something of grave significance for your immediate area of operations, but he won't hear if he doesn't have a radio on ch 3. Thus, to talk to him, you have to use ch 2 and spam guys on the other side of the arena with stuff they don't care about. A vox ch 3 would have the same pros and cons.
The advantage of the range channel is that you can make people nearby hear you even if they're not tuned to your channel. That way, you know your locally-important-but-otherwise-trivial message will get only to those to whom it matters. The disadvantage of the range channel is that your message goes to EVERYBODY in con range whether they need the message or not, and in so doing it can step on their own transmissions in the same way that text ch 2 spam from across the arena crowds out local stuff. This is especially annoying when the range channel spam is in a language you don't speak.
Given these choices, I prefer the vox ch 3 option to the range channel. If a group of non-squad players is really cooperating, they will be using text ch 3 or some other common text channel. Those not on these channels aren't part of the group effort, so trying to talk to them is usually a waste of time anyway, even on text ch 2. Thus, the range channel's advantage is largely theoretical, leaving only its disadvantage to have a real effect. Group efforts between non-squaddies usually use some private channel for vox, just like they do with text.
