Looking for in car communications advise (Page 1 of 2)

Our team uses PCI race radios and they work great. We have all 4 cars on the same channel so easy to communicate to the pits or fellow racers. Plus during long yellows we can entertain each other!!  They have a push to talk button we mount in the car and all have their helmets. You can retro fit any helmet to work for $100

Nerdie racing is the best and least expensive stuff that you will find. Troy has great customer support and he is a fellow Lemons racer.

+1 for nerdie/Troy. He makes helmet setups compatible with most systems you may use and at a reasonable price.

Lots of used NASCAR stuff on ebay for things like the car harness and PTT button. An external antenna can greatly extend the range of the radios. Radios come down to how much of a scofflaw you want to be. I had a very realistic dream once of me using ebay sourced straight-from-Hong Kong Motorola GP-68's with great success. As I remember it, they covered VIR in its entirety with no problems.

Sorry, my bad.  I'm wrong and surely breaking the law.

FYI, that right there moves out of 100% legal...

The Baofengs are not legal, but that doesn't stop anyone. They put out too much power for the GMRS and FRS frequencies, and you need a license to operate in the other bands. You need to be very very careful with these radios. They are powerful enough that even if the frequency  you choose isn't used by emergency crews in your immediate area, it can be picked up by a repeater and sent to an area that does. I believe that happened at a west coast race and they had to stop the race until they found the team responsible.

Technically you need a license to use GRMS radios like the popular Midland and Motorola radios too. No one ever gets it, but you're supposed to have it. It's something like $80 through the FCC site.

If you're trying to do communication on the cheap, just get a set of midlands, then make/buy a car harness and helmet kits, and experiment at your track to see where you have signal and where you don't. Worst case just train your team to only try to talk on one section of the track where you know it works.

Also note that setting privacy codes doesn't stop others from hearing you, or separate you from the overall channel, it just filters out anyone not on that code. So if someone is on 5-10, someone else is on 5-15, and someone is on just 5 with no code, the last person can hear all three, but everyone will interfere with everyone else whenever they try to broadcast.

A Wi-Fi router has such a tremendous bandwith. Isn't there some way to take advantage of that?

The way to do an IP based communication system would be to put up several WiFi repeaters around the track to get you the coverage you need. The flatter the track the fewer repeaters you would need to cover the area. You would need to place the repeaters so there was always a line-of-sight path between any 2. The network would be more robust if you can get LOS between clusters of 4 or so.

Those repeaters would be part of a MESH network. From there the IPRadio in the car would hop from repeater to repeater as it went around the track. Your "radio" could be an android phone with an IP based chat program such as WeChat. You could even use that with the cell system if you are at a track with good cell coverage.

Absolutely doable. More expensive than a simple radio setup though if its for just one team. The cost per team would be less if repeater system could be shared among many teams. Multiple teams using the system simultaneously would still have private communication.

Get one of these.  They're expensive but worth it.

We are on a budget, can't afford that high end stuff.

Really want one of those. Hm....

but some serious advice. Some of those Midwest tracks are long and hilly. Need powerful radios. I use Rugged Racing stuff, 5W handhelds in the car and pit. Found some good deals initally and its been worth it. I'm tired of screwing around with the FRS band and wimpy wiring systems. I recently drove a car that had a  car base radio (25W) and it could communicate with the pit from all around Sear Point, and I expect it will be able to work at the Nürburgring Westkuste. Spend the $800 and get a good set up.