Autocom & B2B

[Kritou]

I'm very happy with my Autocom Active-PLUS Rider Kit 200 that gives me satnav voice commands and mobile phone useage via a dongle. I do a fair bit of riding with a friend who also uses an Autocom and so we are looking at B2B options. We could invest in a couple of PMRs but as we only need short range (100mtrs) comms it seems a bit of overkill

I wonder if Autocom have ever considered offering a Bluetooth class 1 dongle that could possibly utilise the pillion circuit to provide such a facility? It seems to me there would be some demand from existing Autocom users for a "plug and play", close in, duplex and interference free B2B without the cost and issues involved with radios. Maybe such a dongle could even pair with the current crop of helmet mounted BT units - they seem to work OK over ranges up to 150mtrs

I have no idea what technical issues might be involved

 

[GSrich]

Due to the many restrictions or drawbacks around Bluetooth technology we do not haveany plans as yet to release any more bluetooth parts other than our phone dongles.

For the bike to bike all you will need is a pair of Motorola transceivers (Part 1399 £90) and a couple of interface leads to get them connected (Part 1440 £15 per bike)

Rich

 

[Womble]

High power Bluetooth is specced at "up to 100m". This would require high quality aerials, mounted in just the right way, and with no interference or reflections from nearby metal objects, like buses. You would probably get a reliable signal at 20-30m, but that's very limited for walkie-talkie purposes, and I doubt it would work well around corners either. There's probably a reason that we still haven't got decent bluetooth headsets for helmets, and that's only a few feet, although using lower powers obviously.

With the price of PMRs, the bluetooth option is also going to have to be really cheap to compete, which makes rubbish aerials and corner-cutting much more likely.

What about wiring up your phones? It would certainly be cheap, assuming that you've already got a compatible phone. It's not instantaneous though - you won't be able to tell the person in front that they're about to miss a slip-road for instance, but it would give you an idea of what you want from such a system and how you'd use it. It would even work on the continent, just watch out for the roaming charges.