Bluetooth Headset to an existing Autocom

[FJR1300A]

So I too am looking for the holy grail of bluetooth headset communication. And, like many of you I would love to have a headset that interfaces to an existing starcom or autocom system. No need for an all inclusive unit like some of the Scala products (which may be great, but not what I'm looking for)...

Anyway, I sent this to Autocom yesterday:

I have what seems like an obvious question to me, but for some reason nobody has done it yet. I would like something very simple. I want a headset, mounted in my helmet, that has a bluetooth connection that interfaces to another bluetooth device (a two way dongle if you will) that I can plug directly into your headset jack on any of your units. This seems like it would be so simple to do yet nobody has done it. Your unit would work exactly as it does today, like a hub for all audio devices on the bike, with a very straight forward bluetooth device that plugs into the headset jack. All of the "brains" of the system are still in your existing device. Can someone PLEASE explain to me in simple terms why this isn't possible!?

And this was their response this morning:

It can be done. We don’t do it because we believe it isn’t safe enough for motorcycle use yet. Here are the reasons:


Power consumption. In order to conserve energy current headsets actually power down between cell phone calls, so even though the power light is on, until your actually in a cell phone call most of the unit is not powered. When you add in music which would require the unit to be on all the time the power consumption goes up dramatically reducing your battery life.

Quality. Quality is actually getting better however it still doesn’t meet our standards for use on a motorcycle. In a car you don’t have ambient and bike noise getting in the way of clarity.

There are several other reasons however these are the big ones. If you have any other questions please let me know.

So it looks like we'll be waiting a while for an autocom solution like this. However, I email Starcom last week with an identical question and was told that they were working on it and to wait a few months. Hopefully that's true!

 

[collett]

That is an interesting response. I don't fully understand it, but maybe that's just me.

It should be easy to make a dongle/headset to do what you are asking. Any dongle with stereo capability will do it on the output end already, they would just need to setup their microphone with an existing headset.

The battery life reason doesn't really hold up as even with music on all the time, you would still be able to get about 10 hours out of most systems that use high capacity batteries. The Bluetooth modules do not take up a lot of current themselves, it is mainly in the level of amplification to your speakers that consumes power.

Ryan