Communications IN-car

You can have good sound, good range and good price. Two of the three anyway, if you want all 3 it costs.

Spider, I sent you an email.

Which Motorolas are you using?  We use business grade Motorola GP300s and once we worked out harness and helmet issues, we have been in good shape.

In the consumer grade radio world, I also like the Motorolas over the Midlands.  The Midlands may have more range but they have less volume than the Motorolas.  Most of the current Motorola Talkabouts also have a mini-usb charge port which makes it easy to tie into the car.

One problem with all radios is, range declines as the batteries get weaker.  I don't know how much that affects other aspects of the radio but low power means less range.

While lots of teams use mini-din motorcycle kits or even surveillance kits, many of those accessories look the same. I have cut open a few different motorcycle kits and some have no shielding and not really any insulation either. The sound quality is worse on those.

As an exercise in futility, I converted a few of the dirt cheap kits off Amazon to NASCAR.  Rewiring most of it with better wire, the difference was significant.

I did get feedback that using ear buds, even with the typically quiet Midlands, resulted in good volume.  For the first time ever, they actually turned the radios down. So running ear buds does help make the radios easier to hear.

Personally, I prefer helmet speakers.  I think some are louder than others but I haven't done any scientific comparisons. I did do a seat of the ear drums test for overall volume between the Midlands GXT1000s, Motorola MH230R and Motorola GP300 with a set of regular headphones. At full volume in a quiet room, you can hear the Midlands at say a conversational level. The Motorola MH230R was about like a loud conversation and the GP300s were annoyingly loud. At some point I want to use a decibel meter to do a comparison.

Anyway, my experience has been that the consumer grade Motorolas are a bit louder and more user friendly for what we are doing than at least the Midlands. There are other consumer grade radios out there, but Midlands and Motorolas are the most common.

http://www.discounttwo-wayradio.com/longtrack

They are a little pricey but if you spread out cost among the drivers, it won't hurt too much.  These are the real deal and will work all day on a single charge.  Over our 4 years, we have added an antenna for tracks like Fernley (big hill), extra battries for a true 24 hour race and extra radios so every one is in touch during the race.  We have never had a problem with communication using these radios.  They will give you 8 channels in case of a conflict but we never had any.

Two questions I have for the group...

1) What kits are folks using to convert a small two way radio with a screw in antenna to an outboard larger antenna that you could magnetically mount to the roof or package shelf in back window?

2) Who has used the throat mics with surveillance style ear buds? I am pretty sure some have used them and as they are affordable and portable and jack into two pin radios with a simple click and go... I am interested.

Thx!

External antennas are not available for consumer grade radios.  External antennas are available for business grade radios.

Once we had the right BNC connector for our radio, we have not exceeded the range of our Motorola GP300s.

As a new nerdy project, I wanna try a mobile radio.

I use Motorola MH230Rs for my test radios so yes, I make a kit for them. The 230 of the MH230R denotes 23 mile range.  I like them better than the Midlands but I would suggest the MR350R over the MH230R because it's the 35 mile version.  Neither will get anywhere near their mileage ratings but 35 v 23 is about 50% stronger so you are more likely to stay in range and the price difference is about $20.00.  In fact at Best Buy they are both right about $50.00.

The consumer grade Motorolas are louder than the Midlands and offer a simple mini-USB charger option.  You are likely to share a channel with another team but you should be able to hear better and not have to worry about batteries if you use an in-car charger.  So the MR350R is my recommendation if you are looking at consumer grade radios.

You can get older Midland GMRS handheld radios with external antenna connectors (i.e., the rubber-duck antenna unscrews, revealing what I recall is an SMA connector). I have several G-11s, which I used for communication at Thunderhill way back when) The signal strength was great with a trunk-mount cop-surplus UHF antenna, though there were some interference problems with all the dozens of teams on each GMRS channel. The G-11 also has the double-jack standard Motorola headset connector.

No G-11s on eBay, but they're out there. In fact, a quick Google search brought up these G-11s for $17.99 on Overstock.com.

There are lots of Chinese knock off radios out there.

4 watt UHF radios work well. There is a 5 watt UHF but I don't recall who makes it. On the site you listed, they showed some 7 watt handhelds. I don't know if there are FCC regulations on this stuff but there are definitely some interesting things out of China.

we have the motorola mag-ones, and they have great range and are super durable. we have had terrible in-helmet communication using cheap gear until now. trying a racing radios IMSA harness and in-helmet kit with push to talk button to see how well it works. once we can confirm awesomeness, other team members will be similarly outfitted.