Upgrades 33. Ear Protection, Headset, Intercom
After a few long blats in the car, you soon realise that you will need to wear some form of ear protection to stop your ears from ringing after a drive (and of course to prevent long term damage), also it is nice to have some music on as well. I'd read up a lot on the various options that people consider in Caterhams before I went down the route of creating my own.
For the first six months I actually just used some JBL ear buds connected to my phone, with noise cancelling on whilst driving. The problem with this is that they do not actually protect your hearing (although they do offer better protection that with no ear buds inserted), also should you want to listen to music, you will have to have the volume all the way up to actually hear anything, which when the car is stopped, is VERY loud. So basically with this in mind, I think proper ear protection is probably the best route.
The other thing to think about was that if I had passengers, I'd like to communicate with them, and as such some form of intercom which does not rely on the internet was also essential. I also had at the back of my mind the need to talk to other Caterham drivers in the group over a two way radio.
The spec then was basically this:
There are a few off the shelf options out there, in fact there is one that ticks all the boxes and I've not really heard any bad things about, but it comes in at a hefty price tag, and you have to buy the two way radio on top of the headset price. For reference this is the Just Add Lightness headset.
The JAL headset is built on the 3M Peltor Optime III earmuffs. The 3m range seems to be a common choice across the forums for ear defenders, and as such I decided to follow suit and go for the 3M Peltor X3A base. The X3A choice was because they are slightly smaller and more comfortable than the Optime III in my opinion, they also come in Red and Black to match the car. I think they do other colours but each offers a varying difference in ear protection.
Next was to work out what to use for the connectivity. I didn't want to spend much on this, but wanted to tick as many of the boxes as possible. In the end I opted for the Cardo Freecom 4x range (which is designed for motorbike comms). There are other makes out there (Sena for example) but these fitted the bill and also were on special offer 50% off for the duo pack at the time of buying. Some people opt for the 2X (which is usually cheaper) and also some upgrade to the Packtalk/Edge systems, which offer more functionality.
So let me be clear on what you do and don't get with the Cardo Freecom 4X:
The elephant in the room here is the fact that you cannot share audio between headsets natively whilst having the intercom on. So in short what this means is that if you want to talk over the intercom, you cannot share the same music/audio feed, so you would both need to have your own music on from a different device.
Luckily for me I have a Samsung S22 phone, which has the ability to output to more than 1 Bluetooth device at any time, so I basically paired both the Cardo units to my phone, and when I ever want to share music, I use the phone functionality for this, and not the Cardo unit sharing. This then means both can listen to the same music together whilst talking over the intercom.
I haven't tested the two way support yet, however there is an option to hook up the intercom to allow this, on a separate Bluetooth channel, so as long as the PMR radio is Bluetooth headset enabled, you should be good to go. I'll probably look into a PMR radio for this next year when the blatting season starts again.
Pulling the 3M muffs to pieces was pretty easy, rotate each muff so it can slide off the head band, then the white plastic pops off the unit, allowing you full access inside.
I chose to use a Dremel with drill attachment to cut notches where I wanted the wires to go into the unit. Basically one larger hole for the microphone to pass through, and two smaller holes near the headband for the headphones
I used the Velcro pads supplied with the Cardo to fix the microphone to the inner plastic, and then used Velcro again to fix the speakers to the foam muff in the middle.
Once put back together I tidied up the cables, used the sticky pads to put the Cardo unit on the outside of the left hand muff (I chose not to mount this on the headband using the clip provided as it was not as comfortable to wear).
They took a bit of setting up to get right. Basically there are a few volume sliders that needs adjusting to get the best out of the intercom and music.
When you have the intercom active at any time, the volume wheel (or phone buttons) will change the Intercom volume channel, if you are listening to music at the same time, the music will also go up and down together with this, it will play music at the percentage of the intercom volume that you set on the background volume slider. The only way to setup the background volume is in the app.
