Communications issues

In the two games we've played so far, we've decided that short-wave radios/walkie-talkies are available to PCs. This is highly useful for keeping in touch and getting folks involved in various ways. It also leads me to wonder how other groups are handling PC communications. Do all the PCs travel in a pack? If you're not there, you're unreachable? Do you have runners? How does it work in your group?

In my game so far the PCs communicate by walking over to where the other probably is. There is one walkie-talkie in play and it is used by a PC to communicate to an NPC.

Only 2 sessions in, granted, but so far, no mention of radios or other forms of communication.  I think everyone is assuming that they are very rare.  In fact, one of the characters is a driver with a big armored dump truck, and one of the other characters is a gunlugger who regularly goes with him to help protect the goods.  In the first session they ran into some trouble and it would have been useful to be able to communicate.  The players were joking about running two cans on a string between the cab and the back.  No one brought up walkie-talkies or anything at all.

The existence and locations of various radios in our game have been really critical. Some people have private encrypted channels, otherwise you have to talk on the open air (overheard conversations ftw).

Since the PCs tend to fly off in all directions, this has been key to keeping our various threads of action connected.

I MCed a game (incedentally we had three vehicles and three players) where the players had radios all over the place. I played in a game where no one had any radios, nor any real need for them.

I played in another game where we DID have radios, AND a need to use them, but we never used them because I didn't trust the guy who set them up. Yeah, my character sat in one place, next to a radio, and the others still had to come and talk to him in person because the radio wasn't on. (And because I couldn't kick their teath out over the radio.)

I don't think it ever even occured to me that someone might have a radio in our game -- which is interesting, since in other ways our game felt very Apocalypse-light (not much food-scarcity, for example.) All communication was face to face. A couple of times people would send runner NPCs to set up meetings. I can't think of a specific example of communication tension/breakdown that resulted, but I think there were definitely several instances where cellphones radios would have helped clear things up faster.

Relatedly, our PCs were almost always operating out of a single holding, and usually travelling together in groups -- we had one major 'party split' early on, but the player of the split-off character ended up bowing out of the game before we really worked out how that was going to be dealt with at the table.