Hello all.
First things first, you will notice that to the left is a wee picture. This is a new feature with my blog, patented and copyrighted by me, so don’t even think of copying it.
For every new post I make, I will include said picture which should give an accurate representation of what my mileage is with my new bike. So there you go! I am quite excited to track just how many miles go on to the GSR and this gives an easy way of doing it.
Anyway, on to the post: NEW STUFF.
The Scotland trip is coming up in May. We are heading out on Friday 23rd, early doors and head for Inverness. Anyway, Blair and I wanted an intercomm system because we were fed up shouting stuff to each other and if we are on the move, which we will be 99% of the time on the trip, we need an efficient way of saying, “I need petrol” or “look at that 15ft Hawk about to eat your head off…”
So we looked at intercomms, and there were some good, some obviously bad, cheap, expensive and odd. Some names to mention were AutoComm, StarComm and IntaRide. I was really up for IntaRide, we used them when on the DAS course with ProScot. They were really clear and although we had the duff, bare plastic edged logistical earpiece on, the sound was excellent at all speeds, including the faster, country road sections. However, the IntaRide stuff starts at £130. Now, I was up for paying that because I want a system that works when I want it, every single time. I understood that you get what you pay for and that was that. But Blair being Blair, he wasnt up for the out of pocket expense, and fair enough, £130 is a lot of money, and this trip is going to cost a bit anyway.
So we looked to other methods. How about getting them all seperate then? Ok, well what radios should we get? We looked at Motorolas, Alans, Midland and Philips. The Alan G7’s got a really lengthy consideration, but then I stumbled across the Alan 777’s. These were really smart, very compact and would be perfect for what we wanted, a small radio which could be on the person, thus not too big and heavy. The 777 also had new tech in it, like a mobile phone lith-ion battery thingy and a host of features that sounded good…like 38 CTCSS…who knows, but it sounded good.
We found them here, which worked out as £60 for 2, £30 each for radios, instead of £100. So far so good. What about headsets? well again, here for £19.99 each! So for £50 we were getting a full rig! Plastic money was produced and virtual money exchanged virtual hands. CUT to today, when I opened them up and seen what it was all about:
This is the Alan 777. It is tiny, has a small inverted LCD display and a nice cherry red paint finish
Click below to see the rest of this post and tonnes of pictures…
You get a belt clip attachment with it, which you can either screw in to the back of the radio or forget about it.
On the left you have the Push To Talk (PTT) button, and the up/down/volume button.
On the right you have the hole where you put the motorcycle headset/charger cable, then a scan/lock keypad button and finally the on/mode/options button.
You also get a lanyard for wearing around your neck. I fancied this setup for the bike so attached it, and the belt clip cause I like options…haha.
There it is. I have average sized hands, so you can see just how small it is.
In the box you get a dual charger and a mains adapter, which conveniently has 2 ends on it. Which means you can either charge the 2 radios docked or just plugged directly in. Again, I like the options here.
So there you go! The radios are clear enough, however I didn’t really get to test them out that much. I shall explain why after I show you the headset.
The headset from Midland/Alan (I think) looks the business. And as far as I can tell so far, it also works the business too, however I haven’t yet tried them in the helmet yet due to one of the sets being dodgy. I opened one of them and tried it out on the radio. It worked and I was chuffed. It seemed to be loud enough and the microphone was clear enough through the internal speaker of the other radio.
However when I opened the other headset to start installing them, the microphone on this one didn’t work. I then tried all combos of cables and radios but it seemed like the headset was a duffer. I emailed the company that sold me them and they said no probs for a return. So the look like this:
The no-frills packaging
A jumble of cables, including the push to talk handlebar mount
The speaker isn’t permanantly fixed to the helmet, but is vecro’d in to the helmet when needed
The PTT button, works fine and is solidly built. Seems to fit ok on the left grip too, but not sure about usage whilst riding yet…
Those worried about having squashed ears need worry no more, these are really thin, around 5mm ish
I have a Shoei XR-1000, which has a faux leather covering at the ears, which allowed me to fix the sticky back velcro in to it no problem. However my brothers helmet, a Schuberth S1 has a cloth covering at the ears, which meant I couldn’t fix his in, and the velcro speaker bit wasn’t secure enough to stick there without the double sided velcro.
A close up. When these are in without the speaker attachement I can’t feel them at my ears. Which is good.
This is the adapter so that we could use a conventional 2 pin headset with our Alan 777’s, which is a 1 pin.
So there you go!
I am hoping I will get the new headset next week sometime and I can try them out next weekend with my brother. I am desperately hoping that they dont disappoint because I dont think I can stand the thought of wasting £60, just so I didn’t have to pay £130 for stuff that was guaranteed to work.
Fingers crossed!
Thanks for looking!
Gordon
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