With the hands-free mic now installed in the car this means I can be on air more often mobile and not have to drop carrier for roundabouts, traffic lights, junctions, traffic jams, and any other time where I need to change gear or direction which requires both my hands to do
In practice the setup works fine and I have had 2 audio reports already and they have come back positive, this meant I have not had to make any adjustments to the microphone gain.
I put the microphone to the test on a journey from the seaside town of Scarborough yesterday, the nearest two repeaters to that town are GB7RW at Robin Hood's Bay just up the coast from Scarborough near the town of Whitby, though it covers into Scarborough for mobile operators and those with a decent outdoor base station antenna at least, my other choice is usually GB3YC but a lot of the time have found it is listed as not operational on ukrepeater.net though I have checked it now and it appears to be operational so I could have used that repeater, others I did use on that journey are GB3HG and of course GB3IR, but no one did come back to me, and it was literally yards from home when someone actually called on GB3IR thus making me unable to respond to the call, as I was not far off shutting the car off.
I am happy that I have got a safe means to operate in the car and I have found it easy to use, I just flick a switch to talk and flick it again to listen, not a bad investment and I can easily fit it to my next car as well, I just need to figure out how to get the up/down buttons to send the correct data to the radio to work as up/down.
The next major job is properly arrange the shack and sort out the desk arrangements.
73 de 2E0EIJ
