Wednesday 25 June 2008

Giving my Other Half an Earful!

If you've been following this blog, you'll remember last year my OH bought a Starcom rider to pillion communication system and the various issues we has with it, which resulted in him taking it back for a refund.

For a variety of reasons, he hadn't acquired another system and it was starting to get boring and dangerous for me on the back, especially on long runs. So, at the start of the month he bit the bullet and bought an Autocom system.

Our initial impressions of this system were really positive. The microphone is on a boom, so it can be positioned close to the mouth. On the Starcom system, the microphone is stuck to the front of the helmet. Also, the cables to connect the parts in the helmet to the brains of the system under the bike seat are much more substantial than the Starcom ones. They also have raised "bars" on each end of the connectors, making it easy to connect to the system, even with gloves on.

The setting-up of Autocom (in terms of volume, vox sensitivity etc) seemed much easier than
with Starcom. I've no idea of the technicalities of it, when we went out for a set up run my OH only had to pull over once to make adjustments. I think we pulled over 4 times in 3 miles setting up Starcom...

We've now used Autocom during a few runs and it works really well. There's little is no wind interference (when we've experienced it, its been windy) and we can hear each other
clearly.

It seems Autocom is really well designed, by bikers, for bikers. The bit that impressed me was in the instructions for "in-house" basis setting up was to run the system with a hoover on in the room to replicate wind noise. Great attention to detail, as far as I'm concerned.

Now that I've experienced both of the main rider to pillion communication systems, I can safely say Autocom outshines Starcom by a mile.

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