Comms questions

[luke213]

Well guys over all the years I've been playing radio has typically not been much of a priority for most of the places I've played. Some of the games I played down in lower Michigan years ago it was helpful but not necessary. So typically I ran an FRS radio and for a while one of those crappy throat mic's that never worked well from Radio Shack and mostly ran just the raw radio clipped to my gear.

So fast forward, I've always thought radio comm's were an important part of airsoft and I've been planning on bringing them more to the forefront of the games I'm organizing as well as just getting prepared to use them more in game.

But my question is less to do with the radio itself, I'm planning on picking up one of the UV5F I think it is, eventually but right now I don't really need any more than a simple FRS radio I already own will offer for features. So I'm more wondering what you guys are running style wise for comm equipment. IE Just a speaker with mic, throat mic or some other variation. What works best for you? Does it depend on play style?

Right now I picked up a fairly normal shoulder style mic, but I'm a little leery of it giving away my position if someone is rattling off on the radio. So I'm wondering if something with a headset type of component would maybe be more practical. But that said I'm just curious to use some of you guys experiences which are likely to be more in depth than my own at this point with radio's;)

So I'm open to input what are you guys using and what do you like about, what have you used you hate and why?

Take care!

Luke

[ctres]

The baofengs are pretty good radios. I have a couple of them myself. Speaker mics work well in ~90% of situations but if you need to go stealthy then you may want something else but imo in those situations it is usually sufficient to just turn down your volume as long as your radio is within reach. A lot of the speaker mics have a port for an earpiece if that is what you are looking for. Be warned though, the baofengs speaker mics are super flimsy. Recently I've seen two of them show up DOA. Me and my friends have several others that have been fine though. If you intend for the mic to be a permanent setup then you might want to get a higher end one from Kenwood or something.

As for headsets there are an infinite number of options including real military headsets as well as knockoff versions. Apparently the clones by TRI are actually pretty decent but I've stuck with real peltors after a crappy set of ztactical comtacs years ago. Over the ear headsets are great if you are going for a realistic look but imo aren't really the ideal setup since they limit your situational awareness to a certain extent.

[Zzan]

I use a shoulder mike, but it has a privacy port on it and I have an earpiece running from it so the mic is never used as a speaker.  If your shoulder mike doesn't have a privacy port you can replace it with one that does for around $10.00 on ebay, that should get rid of your concerns around someone talking when you are trying to hide.  The Baofengs are solid radios.  They are a little tricky to program with the CHIRP software due to the fact that you have to downgrade the usb to serial cable driver to an older version because Windows wants to auto-install a newer version that isn't compatible. Other than that they are great to work with.  You don't need the software to program them, you can do it all from the keypad on the radio, the software just makes it easy if your entire team uses the same radio and you want everyone set up the same quickly and easily.