Bike to Bike Communication: Do You Need It and Which is Best?

Hi I'm Francoa from Adventurebike Troop.com

Now in this video I want to briefly chat about bike-to-bike communication systems

now picture this you and your wife are riding two separate bikes

you've been on the road for three months you in the western desert of Egypt in the Sahara

desert and you come to a police checkpoint in the middle of nowhere

and stop your bike there's nothing to be seen apart from a

small little shack on the side and unmarked or a policeman in normal clothes

looking quite shaggy walks over from a shack and asks you to get off the bike

now without communication with the other rider it's impossible to make a plan

do you speed off do you turn around do you get off the bikes do you leave the

bikes what do you do and this is actually something that happened to us more

than once but this was quite a scary moment We ended up having tea with the guy in his shack with another policeman lying on the bed fast asleep and offered us breakfast

It's quite a weird situation, but you never know with situations like these

And it is very helpful to be able to communicate before you leave the safety of your bike

Now there are some advantages as well from not having bike-to-by communications

Like in our case, we didn't take any communication systems on this three-month journey

Now the advantage was that we couldn argue while on the bikes we couldn get fed up or tied aboard with each other company because there was no way to communicate So if you did see something on the side of the road you had to wait till you stop in order to share that experience and by the time you stop for the night to camp you got a

whole days worth of experiences to share around the campfire whereas if you can chat all

day long you might have nothing to say so there are some advantages and

disadvantages but let's have a quick look at the different types of systems we're

going to go into detail if you want more detail I wrote a post on this you can

check it out at adventurebike troupe.com slash bike to bike I'll also post a link in

the description below now the first way the most obvious way is just normal

Bluetooth to Bluetooth you get these days some of the modern helmets has Bluetooth built

in it's a simple microphone in the helmet with a ears piece or

earphones, earphones that's the word, and you connect the two helmets either your

passenger and yourself or another biker and yourself via the helmets. Now the problem with Bluetooth is that it's sometimes unreliable, it might cut the

connection for no reason, you also have to pair the two devices first, some of the

modern ones you just tap the helmets together, others you have to, it's a more of a

fiddly process similar to when you pair your phone with you. a Bluetooth car device etc now the advantage of Bluetooth is you can have multiple

riders chatting to each other all the time whether this is good or bad is

debatable but Bluetooth is very convenient Bluetooth is not that reliable over longer distances you need line of sight So if you go around bends or if it quiet if you do ride with large gaps it might be a bit of a problem

That is where the next one comes in handy. That's our two-way radio

This uses various frequencies like FM or UHF, etc. It's like a CB radio

You can stash the physical handheld radio in your tank bag or in your jacket

you then have to somehow connect it to your helmet to the speaker the microphone and the headset or the earpieces now

the advantages of radio is that it's much more reliable over longer distances the radio signals bounce off

buildings and rocks and boulders and mountains much better so you can chat over longer distances you still need line-of-sight more or less

but it's more reliable and you have to then connect to helmet so in this case

there's one of the most reliable options is wired systems so the actual radio on

your bike is wired to your helmet and it's plugged into the to the bike so it

has a constant power source not like the Bluetooth that has a battery that you have

to charge every day if you ride the whole day long with the two-way radio it's

always charged up through the batteries or through the batteries or through the

bike's battery. Now the thing with the wired system is you have to remember to unhook it or

to disconnect it when you get off the bike. Now this is not as bad as it seems but for some it

might seem inconvenient And for that you can get a device that connects the radio for your two radio with your helmet via Bluetooth so either a Bluetooth helmet or a separate Bluetooth device that attached to

your helmet that speaks to the two-way radio that then speaks to the other two-way radio

on the other bike now the other thing with two-way radios is that they'll push to

talk so only one person can chat at any given moment so when you press the button

it might be a button on the handlebars on the physical radio then no one else

can check they can only listen so that's maybe not a bad thing but something to

keep in mind now you have to keep in mind also that not all the radios can

connect with your GPS and your cell phone or your iPad or music playing device

and usually the Bluetooth can pair with all of those so you can listen to music

listen to the lovely voice on the GPS device shouting directions at you with the two-way radio and you need the correct setup in order to allow that so it can become quite complicated there are these are the major types of systems so before you buy do some research chat with other riders that have it chat on forums or Facebook groups and to make sure that you get the right device with the right functions for you because it's not always that easy

to find it online now check out the post that I made go to adventure bike troupe.com

slash bike to bike and yeah please let me know in the comments what your experiences

are with bike-to-bike communications thank you for joining us see you next time