Good mesh intercom.
Discussion
After trying a couple of cardos and being disappointed with the way they are slow to pick up speech and unmute the noise cancelling meaning you miss the first word of a sentence a lot of the time, i was hunting for something with multi rider mesh, and a 3.5mm jack which a lot of brands dont have. 40mm speakers sound much better than the cardo 32mm ones, but i prefer to use sennheiser noise cancelling earbuds, but they recently broke so i am using my sennheiser noise isolating earbuds.
I settled on the fodsports fx7, and i am very happy with it, excellent bluetooth quality, perfect speech on a 3 way mesh, good battery life and survived a few wet rides.
It was way cheaper than the cardos and does most things better. If there is one thing from the cardos I could add to the fodsports is app control, but the mesh audio quality more than makes up for it, i was getting sick of repeating myself, and asking my pillion to repeat stuff as the start was cut off.
Just thought I would share that incase anyone else was looking at the different options.
I settled on the fodsports fx7, and i am very happy with it, excellent bluetooth quality, perfect speech on a 3 way mesh, good battery life and survived a few wet rides.
It was way cheaper than the cardos and does most things better. If there is one thing from the cardos I could add to the fodsports is app control, but the mesh audio quality more than makes up for it, i was getting sick of repeating myself, and asking my pillion to repeat stuff as the start was cut off.
Just thought I would share that incase anyone else was looking at the different options.
Last time i looked at sena not many had the 3.5mm jack, which was a must for me, and I read a lot of reports of units failing after getting wet and warranty being denied.
I ride in the rain a lot, water damage killed my previous intercom before the cardos.
Out of interest where do you buy sena mesh for £125?
When i was looking cheapest I saw was £159 each
Could buy 3 fodsports units for that.
I ride in the rain a lot, water damage killed my previous intercom before the cardos.
Out of interest where do you buy sena mesh for £125?
When i was looking cheapest I saw was £159 each
Could buy 3 fodsports units for that.
Edited by OldGermanHeaps on Wednesday 25th September 22:58
OldGermanHeaps said:
Last time i looked at sena not many had the 3.5mm jack, which was a must for me, and I read a lot of reports of units failing after getting wet and warranty being denied.
I ride in the rain a lot, water damage killed my previous intercom before the cardos.
Out of interest where do you buy sena mesh for £125?
When i was looking cheapest I saw was £159 each
Could buy 3 fodsports units for that.
From what I could find, it is only the most expensive and newest Sena that has the 3.5 jack. I wear hearing aids due to minor damage so I am paranoid about making it worse, as soon as I started riding I made sure I had custom moulds done to block wind noise so a 3.5 jack to run through was a must. As I was doing my test I needed to hear the examiner and the trainers so I did lots of research.I ride in the rain a lot, water damage killed my previous intercom before the cardos.
Out of interest where do you buy sena mesh for £125?
When i was looking cheapest I saw was £159 each
Could buy 3 fodsports units for that.
Edited by OldGermanHeaps on Wednesday 25th September 22:58
I have shoei lids which can accept the custom Sena to fit but those ones do not have the 3.5 sadly.
black-k1 said:
I think the delay in opening the comms, thus losing the first word, can be cured by changing a setting in the app. I can't remember which setting but I know we don't have that issue on our Cardo mesh.
Microphone sensitivity option.Although it means the channel stays open more often and for longer, which shortens the battery life, and reduces the volume of the background music/radio almost permanently.
I changed it the other way to be less sensitive so it didn't keep muting the music, and just got into the habit of saying the name of the person i wanted to talk to first which opened the channel and they don't often hear it.
cpszx said:
black-k1 said:
I think the delay in opening the comms, thus losing the first word, can be cured by changing a setting in the app. I can't remember which setting but I know we don't have that issue on our Cardo mesh.
Microphone sensitivity option.Although it means the channel stays open more often and for longer, which shortens the battery life, and reduces the volume of the background music/radio almost permanently.
I changed it the other way to be less sensitive so it didn't keep muting the music, and just got into the habit of saying the name of the person i wanted to talk to first which opened the channel and they don't often hear it.
cpszx said:
Microphone sensitivity option.
Although it means the channel stays open more often and for longer, which shortens the battery life, and reduces the volume of the background music/radio almost permanently.
I changed it the other way to be less sensitive so it didn't keep muting the music, and just got into the habit of saying the name of the person i wanted to talk to first which opened the channel and they don't often hear it.
Yes, i could not find a happy medium that worked as it should, which i thought it was unacceptable to have to use an irratating workaround on a product priced right at the top of the market, when £29 and£51 aliexpress products can manage that same function seamlessly. Plus one of the cardos failed with clicking and popping interference pretty quickly.Although it means the channel stays open more often and for longer, which shortens the battery life, and reduces the volume of the background music/radio almost permanently.
I changed it the other way to be less sensitive so it didn't keep muting the music, and just got into the habit of saying the name of the person i wanted to talk to first which opened the channel and they don't often hear it.
OldGermanHeaps said:
Yes, i could not find a happy medium that worked as it should, which i thought it was unacceptable to have to use an irratating workaround on a product priced right at the top of the market, when £29 and£51 aliexpress products can manage that same function seamlessly. Plus one of the cardos failed with clicking and popping interference pretty quickly.
That is often a result of a traditional Bluetooth connection rather than a mesh connection. There's no reason it should do that but it's a "feature" I've encountered before.OldGermanHeaps said:
Yes, i could not find a happy medium that worked as it should, which i thought it was unacceptable to have to use an irratating workaround on a product priced right at the top of the market, when £29 and£51 aliexpress products can manage that same function seamlessly. Plus one of the cardos failed with clicking and popping interference pretty quickly.
I have had my Packtalks for 10 years, since they released, meshing with friends and family across 6 units, and had very few issues over that period of time with any of them, except a broken volume roller.Setting the sensitivity high will remove that "irritating workaround", so they have connection open nearly all of the time. This will be the same mode as the aliexpress units, to be always on. It may also be the same way if you have the cardo in bluetooth only mode.
If you use them all day, you may get 4-6 hours instead of 8 hours out of the battery like that, for any bluetooth comms unit.
No disrespect to your choice on the aliexpress ones, if you get on with them, thats great, but my Cardo's have been almost faultless, especially the 6 years i was commuting 160 miles a day all weather with another rider.
All users and helmets have different amounts of ambient noise, so its good to have the option to change the way the microphone/voice recognition works based on that. It's a feature, not a limiting problem.
Normally, the premium you pay for something means that the support, warranty, updates, features are a bit better, but if thats not important, buy cheaper, up to you.
OldGermanHeaps said:
I didnt set out trying to find the cheapest unit, like i say i bought a pair of cardo spirit hd, then a packtalk pair and was disappointed with them. When the mic sensitivity was on high the sat nav was inaudible. That doesnt happen on my new ones.
Ah, thats a different but related problem to the voice activation. That is because by default the intercom takes priority over the other "sources". The new ones may not even have/care about source priorities and just push everything at same volume.You can change the priority in the cardo app so that the intercom is lower priority, or you can modify the volume settings so that the other sources do not "mute" when the intercom is in use, and they all have the same volume, like you get with the new ones.
They are customisable features to get it how you want, which i guess is where the premium price stuff comes in, if you want that ability.
Note: Not a Packtalk employee or fan boi, just have been through all of these settings and features before over the years to get what i want from them when faced with similar issues.
All of our group use Pactalk Bold and most with moulded earplugs plugged into the 3.5mm jack. As others have said, playing around with the settings is a must. Overall we don't have many problems at all with up to 12 of us meshed together but none of them are perfect.
What I would say, if the people you normally ride with use Senna than get Senna because although they all claim to be compatible with other makes we've never really had any joy making them work well. Most use a "bridge rider" and that is absolutely crap.
What I would say, if the people you normally ride with use Senna than get Senna because although they all claim to be compatible with other makes we've never really had any joy making them work well. Most use a "bridge rider" and that is absolutely crap.
OldGermanHeaps said:
Last time i looked at sena not many had the 3.5mm jack, which was a must for me, and I read a lot of reports of units failing after getting wet and warranty being denied.
I ride in the rain a lot, water damage killed my previous intercom before the cardos.
Out of interest where do you buy sena mesh for £125?
When i was looking cheapest I saw was £159 each
Could buy 3 fodsports units for that.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/156169983515?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=ygixoNkmRBu&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=0tZkAHCpTCa&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPYI ride in the rain a lot, water damage killed my previous intercom before the cardos.
Out of interest where do you buy sena mesh for £125?
When i was looking cheapest I saw was £159 each
Could buy 3 fodsports units for that.
Edited by OldGermanHeaps on Wednesday 25th September 22:58
Use
https://www.completesavings.co.uk
This gives an extra 10% off so £128.50 delivered to be exact. Few of my lot ordered this system
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