The effect of multipath interference on the performance of packet radios is investigated. The protocols considered include pure ALOHA and slotted ALOHA. Signal reception with and without capture effect is considered in the analysis. Mathematical expressions of system throughput and packet delay have been successfully obtained for each protocol. Numerical calculations are used to demonstrate when the multipath interference can be ignored and when it can be disastrous.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>