Afternoon all.
I've had a good read of this forum but electronics tend to evolve at a rate so its worth asking again.
I’m looking for a wireless (Bluetooth) intercom system between myself and my lady who will be pillion. Its only for one trip to France so don’t want to spend a fortune.
The Sena SMH5 seems to get good ratings but the cheapest I’ve seen is around £170 for a dual system.
Has anyone tried one of the cheaper offerings such as this:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Veetop-Res...om-21&linkId=f62d6a68a18e51f62b4be042f112e0d7
Appreciated
I used to have Sena SMH5s. They were fine, but the issue I had was that they didn't share TomTom or Nav V GPS instructions over the intercom so that my wife could hear them, but just muted the intercom, which wasn't what I wanted. Things got worse when I started using a phone based GPS (MyRoute Navigation) as that would not interrupt the intercom due to phones using a different Bluetooth profile (A2DP) to dedicated GPS devices (HFP), and the Senas wouldn't prioritise the phone based GPS over the intercom in same way they would for a dedicated satnav using HFP. This meant that if I turned on the intercom function I couldn't hear the navigation instructions. To get around this I bought and installed a wired Autocom system which worked perfectly, and the wires to the headests were not as much of a nuisance as I had feared.
Now you don't say whether as well as being able to talk to your good lady you also want to listen to GPS instructions, and if so what type of satnav you would be using, so it is difficult to make a recommendation, however I recently decided to try Bluetooth again and bought a pair of headsets called M1-S which go by various names like Fodsports but are actually made by a Chinese company called Dimton and you can get these for under £90 a pair.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/2PCS-M1-...016933?hash=item2610f17565:g:5IIAAOSwf0hcQWuT
http://www.dimton.com/eng/products/bsh/m1s/index.html
These work perfectly well as a rider to pillion intercom and are actually better than the Senas in the respect that instructions from a conventional satnav connected via the Bluetooth HFP profile are automatically shared with the pillion when the intercom is active. Of course my phone based GPS had the same problems with these headsets as with the Senas in that you can either have the intercom or the GPS instructions but not both due to the phone using the A2DP profile.
I had some discussions with the manufacturers about this, and I found them very responsive and helpful to the extent that they actually produced a new beta version of firmware for the headsets to try to fix this problem. The first attempt did at least mean that the rider could hear GPS instructions from the phone while the intercom was active, which wasn't the case with the standard firmware, but the transmission of GPS over the intercom to the pillion was a bit intermittent and distorted. They are still looking to improve this further.
In the meantime I have found an app for my Android phone which converts its output to use HFP, so it now appears more like a conventional satnav and anything played on the phone, be it music or satnav instructions, is overlaid on the intercom audio so is heard by both rider and pillion while the intercom is active. The app is called Dynamic Media BT Mono Router and can be found on the play store here:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.philipp_koch.dynamicmediabtrouter&hl=en_GB
While this works fine for me, it is not guaranteed to work with every phone, and the limitation of HFP (hands free profile) is that it is designed for two way communication, so for example it is used by the phone when making phone calls, so it receives audio from the microphone in the headset, but is limited to sending out audio to the headset in mono and in lower quality than the A2DP profile which is intended for transmission of high quality stereo music sources.
A lot of these ramblings may not be relevant to you, but I thought I might as well mention in case it is useful to others, but the bottom line is that as far as my experience goes, the M1-S headsets seem a good product and work well, and the manufacturers seem quite supportive, as were the eBay sellers I bought them from.
Fred
PS: The M1-S units use Bluetooth V4.1 which is more likely to work with the TFT than the headsets using older versions, in case this is of interest. I don't yet have any experience with this, but get my new TFT equipped bike next week and will give them a try.