Will a CB radio work for car communications? (Page 2 of 2)

Google, linear amplifier.

I agree, which is why I mounted our radio to a bracket on the main hoop allowing the antenna to penetrate about 3" or so above the roof line.  Like this:

We have the newer Midland GXT-900 GMRS and I don't think the antenna is detachable.  Howver if someone knows it could be detached and coupled to something similar to what you are saying, I'm all ears.

VKZ24, that is my favorite radio mounting method ever.

With GMRS, you are allowed to go up to 50 watts. I don't know how you would do it, but it's allowed under the FCC regs.

It's worth noting that if you lurk on eBay for long enough, you can find a lot of used radio stuff at not insufferable prices. I got a used ex-Sprint Cup Racing Electronics dual radio car harness for our radio setup for something like $30 early last summer and it works just fine. New it would have been well north of $120. But it is a PITA to piece together the entire thing, so starting with that well-recommended Midland setup would be highly advisable.

SHHHHHHHHHHHH...

Don't tell them what they are doing wrong.

We used a CB before and it worked pretty good, but we ended up breaking the mic when the driver would get excited and throw it down inside the car. It worked well enough to get flag information out and you could talk back and forth while under caution.

This time around we are using the Motorola Talkabout MR350R radios and an ebay headset.

http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN … adio_US_EN

No track tesing yet, but I have walked about 3/4 of a mile away through the neighborhood and the radio works just fine. The really cool thing about the MR350R is that it has a mini-USB power jack so that you can run it out of your cig-lighter with a common cellphone charger. It also has the jack for an external PTT headset. We're going to mount ours just like above on the main hoop and have the antenna sticking out through the roof. Now if we could hack the radio and get some kind of external antenna setup, that would awesome.

Here's an ebay link to our headset.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi … 6863998007

Comes with a PTT button on the harness with a volume control and an external PTT button you can mount on the wheel/shifter/seat/ect.  Everyone on the team will get the headset and I paid about $50 for the radios brand new shipped to my door.

Pre-planning helps a TON with almost everything.  Everything we didn't test before the race failed.   The stuff like our radios worked well and our pit stops/driver changes were excellent because we practiced for about an hour one day in my driveway.  Most of ours were between the 2:00 to 2:30 range because we were ready.  That included driver swap, radio hook-up and adding 6 gallons of fuel.  By comparison we watched one team take a full 6 minutes to change drivers and add 5 gallons of fuel.   It is possible we could do ours even faster, but mistakes would likely happen so we were happy with what we did.

Phil, having a hand held mic isn't allowed though, right? Any insights into how I could rig a helmet mic from CB/cheapo ebay parts? The ears part is easy, just blast the audio out through some car speakers. But getting the driver's voice into the CB base unit is making me scratch my head a bit. I guess I could just do some "sperimentin". Also, are marine band radios inherently better for some reason? Are you not allowed to chatter on a regular land based CB? Or would I just be earning cool points for "breakin the LAW"?

We also have a set of Motorola T6220 talkabouts we've used in previous races. Has anyone tried an "ear bone mic" setup before? This ad is pretty convincing and the price is definitely right. Does it look like these would do the job?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi … 0259262062

You can have a handheld mic, as long as you're willing to forget about retrieving it when it falls to the floor of the car during a race. What you can't have is a walkie-talkie loose in the cabin; we don't want racers fumbling around with their Radio Shack Space Patrols and causing wrecks.

In reality, pit-to-car communication is way more useful than car-to-pit, so it's no huge limitation if you can only grab your CB mic when you're under caution. The main thing is to be able to yell "Hey, you idiot! They been a-wavin' black flags at you for the last 20 minutes!" or "Yo, you're on fire!" at your driver.