Passes & Canyons Blog

We have been back to the North Rim and this photo was from a later trip, but we don’t seem to have shot any on this early trip.

By the time John and Bill and I, collectively the OFMC, were getting ready for our third annual trip we had concluded it would be nice to communicate while riding. Up to this point we had depended on hand signals but that meant you had to ride up alongside someone and then make the appropriate motion. Workable but not optimal.

Back in those days we didn’t have a lot of money, which was a big part of the reason we did these trips as much on the cheap as we could. We knew you could get in-helmet communication systems but they were expensive.

I think I was the one who got the idea to check out these inexpensive communicators from Radio Shack. We all three met up one day at a Radio Shack in Lakewood and inquired about these things. What they were was just a chunk of hardware connected by a cord to an ear plug. You put the ear plug in place and just talk and the sound moves through your head via the bone and is picked up and transmitted. Obviously, the speaker is in the earpiece.

We each put an earpiece in our ears and then we walked around, and Bill even went outside to the parking lot. We could hear each other fine, so we figured this would do the job. Great. Pay for them and we’re set. Did we try them out on our bikes before the trip? No. That would have made too much sense.

Our departure on this trip was complicated by the fact that a shop I took my bike to for some pre-trip work totally screwed me over. I’m sure I’ve told that story here before and it’s too long to get into now so suffice it to say, they did not have my bike ready by the departure date. So Bill and John took off without me, with an understanding that I would meet them at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in a few days.

Meanwhile, they took off with their earpieces in and expected to chat as they rode. Sorry, no dice.

What I only came to learn some time later is that radio signals are affected by motion, and the more speed the more they are affected. It turns out that these little cheapos work just fine if you’re walking but on a motorcycle going 65 miles an hour they totally fail. They tried using them that first day, found them worthless, and put them away never to pull them out again. Of course, I didn’t know that. This was well before the days of cell phones.

So I finally got my bike from the shop and I took off, doing some hard riding to reach the Grand Canyon in two days. I had no problem finding the campground but found that I had no way to find them in the campground. I thought they might have left a message for me at the gate, and they had, but I didn’t notice it. I asked the ranger at the gate and he knew nothing but just at that moment a ranger just getting off duty overheard and knew about them and told me where to find their camp site. No problem.

I found their camp site but they weren’t there. All this time I had the earpiece for the communicator in and the unit turned on and I was calling out for them but getting no answer. I was certain they would be listening and waiting for me but no answer. So I set up my tent and went to find them. I rode down to the main parking lot by the lodge, calling for them again and again. Still no answer.

It later turned out that they were there, but somehow I did not spot their bikes. Trying to guess where they had gone I set off on a lengthy wild goose chase that itself is a whole other story. Eventually I just went back to the camp site and by then they were there. They had been back a while before they noticed a new tent in their site so now they had been wondering where the heck I was.

After what I had just been through I was overjoyed to finally find them, and seeing a beer in John’s hand I cried “Give me a beer!” He told me apologetically that this was the last one and I took it from his hand and downed it. And then I asked them why the heck they didn’t respond to me on the communicators. They laughed and told me how worthless those proved to be and it never occurred to them to pull them out to help me find them when I arrived. Actually, they might have done the job in that situation if they had used them. But they didn’t.

That was the last time the OFMC ever seriously considered communicators. Some years later Judy and I got communicators and I specifically got some that would work between bikes in case one of the other guys decided to get a set, too, so we could communicate on rides. But no one else ever was sufficiently interested, so to this day the OFMC operates without communicators. Nowadays, though, we do finally all have cell phones so while not the same, they do the job when needed.

Biker Quote for Today

It’s not a gang. It’s a loose association of rugged outdoorsmen who like vibrations between their legs.

Here's the communicator we ended up with.

If you head out on your motorcycle two-up with your significant other it’s inevitable that at some point you will look into helmet-to-helmet communicators. The alternative is to continue to yell and try to be heard over the sound of the engine, and to frequently crack your helmets together in the process. You know, the way you’re doing it now.

A number of years ago my wife, Judy, and I took the plunge and bought a communicator system and I would have to say the results were decidedly so-so. Here’s our story.

The unit we selected was probably a mistake from the start. If all you want to do is communicate with your passenger, a simple wired system is all you need. I made the mistaken assumption that as my riding buddies and I continued to enhance our gear, some of them would also buy communicators and so it was only logical for me to get a wireless system. Of course, they would have to get the same brand product I had, but I figured that I’d set the precedent and they would follow.

A doxen years on and guess what? Not one of my friends has bought a communicator, except for John, who got one to talk with his wife when she’s on back. Oh well, Judy and I can still talk, and that’s the main thing, right?

Well, sort of.

Installing Speakers
Of course, the first thing I had to do when we bought our communicator was to install the hardware and speakers in our helmets. The foam padding in a helmet already has a cavity where your ears are so they’ll be comfortable, but if you’re going to put a speaker there you have to cut away more of the foam to make room. Our came with some glue and Velcro (or hook and loop as the generic term goes) so I then stuck the Velcro on the back of the speaker and attached it to the helmet. No problem. Except that as soon as the weather turned warm the glue melted and the speakers fell out. Jerry-rigging my way along I finally came up with an approach that held them in place, most of the time.

Initially, the system worked pretty well. We could talk and hear each other, although with voice-activation we found it worked best to start any statement with “Ummmm” to kick the voice-activation on. Of course, this was happening over the airwaves and we weren’t always the only ones using this particular frequency. If we rode along under or beside high-voltage power lines we would usually get a loud, unpleasant humming, which we would try to cancel out by loudly singing, “La la la la la la la la la la la la la.”

Other times we would pick up someone else’s cell phone conversation: “. . . Roger’s coming over at 3 then I need to . . .”
OK, fine. Judy and I can still talk, and that’s the main thing, right?

No, We Can’t
And then there came the day when we couldn’t talk. We were suited up to ride, the bike was warming up, and we connected all the wires. We did our usual tests to make sure we could hear each other, and I could hear her but she couldn’t hear me. I adjusted my microphone, we twisted all the knobs and pushed all the buttons, but nothing doing. So we took off and figured we’d mess with it when we got home.

The trouble was, we couldn’t figure out what the problem was. Next time we went for a ride we geared up again and tried the communicator and once again we couldn’t get it to work. Over the next year I fiddled with the thing again and again, all with no success. So we’re back to yelling and cracking helmets together.

Meanwhile I had been reading on motorcycle forums about different helmet-to-helmet systems and what I learned is that if all you want is communication from one helmet to another, seated on the same bike, the simple wired systems actually work quite well. They are not voice-activated; they’re just always on. The unit acts as a small amplifier, connecting the microphones in both headsets to the speakers in both headsets. They work even better if you use earplugs, and that eliminates the hassle of installing the speakers.

In other words, this is the sort of system we would have bought if I hadn’t had that silly notion of my buddies getting communicators, too. So did I got out and buy one of those?

No, I got an email asking if I’d like to try out a bluetooth communicator. Of course I had to have two to actually test them so they sent two. And they work great. That’s what we use now. I won’t rehash what I wrote about them at the time; you can see that here. Suffice it to say that Judy and I never have trouble talking on bike rides any more.

Biker Quote for Today

I went somewhere once and came back. It was kind of fun. I just might do it again.