Vacation….and another thought on Bluetooth
I just spent a couple of days down in Miami Beach. I didn’t take any of my handhelds, although I’m thinking that maybe I should have. We were on the 10th floor of our hotel, so I could have done pretty well on VHF. Maybe next time.
On the flight home, I happened to be flipping through one of the in-flight magazines and noticed that Plantronics is now producing a wireless headset for cell phones, the M1500. It has a range of up to 30 feet and its rechargeable battery provides 2.5 hours of talk time, 60 hours of standby time. The headset fits neatly over the ear, and it comes with an adapter that plugs into the headset jack of a cell phone.
I’m going to contact Plantronics about adapting this for amateur radio use. There’s two ways to go: get them to sell me just the headset and build an adapter or get them to also design and build an adapter. In addition to the audio output, the adapter would also have to have a push-to-talk output. Also, I would have to design and build cables for the different rigs currently on the market. That might be kind of a hassle, as they all seem to use different connectors.
Even so, I think this would be a very cool amateur radio accessory.
