You can transmit but you can’t hear a thing — here’s the fix path, and no, you’re not the first person this happens to.
Start with the simplest thing first: the volume knob. I know, that sounds insulting. But radios get bumped in holsters and bags all day, and the volume dials on a lot of models turn way too easily. Crank it to max. If you hear even a faint hiss, your speaker is alive and the problem is somewhere before it. If you searched ‘walkie talkie no sound’ and landed here, this is exactly where we start on our end too.
Next suspect: squelch. If squelch is cranked up high, the radio filters out everything — including actual transmissions. Back it off until you just barely hear background noise when nobody is talking, then stop. That’s the sweet spot. A shocking number of ‘can’t hear anything’ reports are just squelch set too high after somebody handed the radio around.
Then check mute and monitor. Some models have a mute setting or a monitor button. Hold monitor to bypass squelch and force audio through. If you can hear people with monitor held but not normally, it’s a squelch or settings thing — the hardware is fine.
If it’s the classic can’t hear walkie talkie situation even with squelch at minimum and volume maxed, run the isolation test: plug in a known-good earpiece or speaker mic. Sound through the accessory but nothing from the internal speaker? The speaker is your problem. Silent through both? That points at the audio amplifier inside, which honestly is a repair-or-replace call. To be fair, if your search was ‘radio speaker not working’, the internal speaker is the least fixable part at home — opening the radio usually voids the warranty, so contact us first if it’s still covered.
One more angle: if the radio worked yesterday and went quiet today, test the accessory you were using. Coiled cords break right at the jack — nobody tells you this but it’s the single most common accessory failure there is. Dead earpieces or a worn speaker microphone are cheap swaps, and headsets are the durable route if this is a weekly problem.