Interbike communication systems

[Lao Jia Hou]

Could you route the 3 cables along the helmet so that they all come down from one point, using duct tape or other precision engineering?

Yes, after a genuine road test, two things became apparent:

1) those wires are annoying - so duct tape was used when I was back home. It is actually pretty easy to secure them inside the helmet and route them to a common junction point.

2) the little dab of nail polish is not enough. I had a very weird event on a ride home a couple of days ago. Dusk, and I hit a bird (I think I may have killed the ONLY bird that lives in central Beijing - actually, next to Euphonius' Beijing home, but don't tell him). It glanced off my mirror, and then hit my right luggage box at some weird angle, causing my box's top cover to fly off into traffic. Quickly stopped the bike, dismounted (damn wires!), and ran back to rescue my box top (bird was beyond hope) before some bus/truck might run over it. Got it - returned to bike - huffing and puffing - took me several minutes to figure out where the damn wires reconnect because my drops of nail polish fell off when I did a quick disconnect. This is a Chinese connector, so I didn't want to push too hard unless I was sure it was lined up properly. I need some method of making the DIN connector line-up much more visible in dim light.

Do you have to keep the button pressed in as you're talking? It just looks like it might be a bit awkward to talk for very long with the button where it is.

Yes, you have to keep the button depressed. I haven't noticed awkwardness with it - however, I have only tested this with my sweety and I have been doing 90% of the listening.

Is there any possibility to listen to music through this system, other than the radio? I mean like hooking up an mp3 player. As ChinaV implied, a happy wife...

It would be easy to splice in a 3-way switch - so a person would have the option of walkie talkie, or mp3 player, feeding into the ear pieces, but one would cut the other off. The FM radio that is included in my walkie talkies is automatically over-ridden when an incoming communication is received. There may be some walkie talkie out there with an mp3 input jacks, but I haven't seen them (I was shopping in the lower end of the price spectrum).

I once went down the same road with my scooter and got a bit carried away...

After I picked myself off the floor from laughter, I looked closely at the pic, thinking you photo-shopped it ... but no ... it looks 100% genuine! Great, a kindred spirit.

Maybe we should start a "China Hornets Motorcycle Club"?

Btw, I'm usually aghast at matching his/her jogging suits, etc ... but this looks kinda cool!