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How to use a phone on a motorbike without losing your cool

Long-time biker and gadget addict Tony Sleep reviews the Cardo Scale Q2 Teamset. It allows two bikers to chat, or take mobile phone calls, or listen to their GPS voice, using Bluetooth. He didn't expect to like it...

Motorcycling is compulsory zen. It's balancing your life on two footprint-size bets against probability and hurling your squashy body through a world of lethally hard things. It doesn't matter how much rubbish and anxiety is in your life, you'd better learn to shut up the chattering monkey on your shoulder else it will do its best to kill you.

In fact that is the single best thing about motorcycling. It's not the machines, nor the freedom from congestion, nor the agility or speed, nor the improbable physics of cornering. It's the requirement to take an enforced holiday and travel light in the unfolding now. Om.

So why on earth would anyone want a device like the Cardo Scala Q2 headset? Its sole purpose is surely to complicate all this, to re-clutter your mind with distraction that impedes enlightenment and causes visits to A&E?

GPS

There are good reasons. Getting lost is one of them. I have decades of squinting at soggy maps and trying to commit chunks of Hackney or Milton Keynes to memory. I once went to Basingstoke instead of Beaconsfield as I couldn't be bothered to stop and check a map. If you're this much of an idiot, you need GPS.

On a motorcycle there are really only two choices, the Tom Tom Rider and Garmin Zumo. Both are weatherproof and with large buttons operable in advanced stages of hypothermia. A year ago, after reading too many horror stories about Rider mount failures, I bought a Zumo 550. The 550 is expensive, but comes with a car mount as well as motorcycle kit, can pair with a phone and has a built-in MP3 player.

I have to say the Zumo is a wonderful bit of kit, but on a bike it only delivers sound through a Bluetooth headset I didn't have. Until I got the Scala I could only use it silently, which was OK but did mean I had to pay rather too frequent attention to the screen. I'm forced to ride significantly slower when using it.

Intercom

Another good reason is my wife. For many years, she was a perfect pillion. Knowing no better, she seldom screamed. Things changed when she learned to ride and got her own bike. When we rode together even if I didn't get lost, she did. After one spectacular navigational oversight sent her 20mls in the wrong direction whilst I waited at the roadside for her to realise she wasn't following me, I bought some Cobra 2-way radios. They worked well, but the clutter of wires to headset and handlebar push-to-talk switch made putting jackets and helmets on a chore. Mostly we didn't bother.

Overview and installation

So the Scala kit arrived with a couple of holes to fill, GPS and rider-passenger or bike-to-bike.

That it also handles mobile phone calls and FM radio are, for me, bonuses of dubious value. On a bike you're constantly dodging distracted motorists taking calls, including one guy who turned right across my path. He was making notes, phone clamped between ear and shoulder, pad and pen in his hands, and steering with a spare finger. Hands-free or not, phone calls and vehicles are a worrying combination.

The first thing to say about the Scala is: read the manual. Even if like me you're the sort of person who prefers to grok through meddling, you will never figure out how to operate this kit without help. There are a lot of functions hidden behind just four weatherproof buttons. Even finding two of them may defeat you. It is all very clever, logical and simple to remember, but trial and error will get you confused. The manual is good and only 5mins read.

Fitting the headset to the helmet is easy once you figure out that the standard clamp-on mount for the Scala unit cannot and will not fit any normal full-face helmet because the padded skirt gets in the way. We tried 4 very different helmets, and only on one was fixing possible by displacing the removable lining. Even then, the clamp loosened off in an hour, and would not have stayed in place. The clamp-on mount may fit some helmets somewhere, probably some open face types, but in a household of bikers we couldn't find any.

Fortunately Cardo provide alternative self-adhesive mounts which are easy to attach. Make very sure you have the location absolutely right, because the ferocious adhesive only gives you one chance. I suggest you clean the area with the supplied pad then assemble the speakers and mic boom and mount into the helmet, check carefully then draw round the mount position with a felt tip. Now you know where it should fit, remove the backing paper from the mount and press hard, finally wiping away the felt tip marking using the pad.

The earpieces and mic stay in the helmet semi-permanently as their connector block is attached to whichever mount by Allen screws. The actual Scala unit clips on, so can be removed when not in use or for charging.

The UK chargers are tiny wall-warts with two small flat-pin mains terminals. Connection to UK sockets needs adaptors which are not supplied, and they should be because they are rare as hens teeth. Fortunately I had one from an old German flashgun. Unfortunately I didn't have two.

Once that problem is solved, a couple of hours charging will see you ready to use the units. Before that, there is a challenging moment. After you connect the Scala to the charger, nothing happens and you scratch your head. The LED is supposed to light solid red to indicate charging, and does, but only after about 10seconds - long enough for you to assume a charger or adaptor fault and disconnect the lot. So don't do that.

Using the Scalas

Clipping the Scala units onto their mounts and powering up was enough to prove they worked loud and clear as intercoms. So loud that only about 2/3 volume is more than enough, which is impressive. If you find otherwise, it will be because the helmet speakers need to be exactly over your ears and need repositioning on their velcro pads. For some reason I have never been able to get the left speaker positioned as comfortably as the right, but I may have asymetric ears.

The units are voice-activated, full duplex, which means no push buttons. Either person can speak into the mic and it just works. After 15 secs or so of quiet, the system mutes into standby so there's silence through the earpieces instead of background hiss. Further conversation is then just a matter of speaking into the mic and the system wakes up within a second or two. This is very elegant and far less distracting than older cabled intercoms where faffing around with handlebar mounted push-to-talk buttons meant distraction.

Bluetooth

The bit that made me most nervous was getting the GPS and phone talking Bluetooth to the Scala. I'll be honest about this, I expected trouble. Bluetooth has cost me days of frustration in the past: pairing of phones and Palmpilots, recognition of BT adaptors in laptops and drivers that didn't work without hacks and patches.

Sure enough I spotted forum complaints about Scala Q2 failing to talk to GPS units. The Tom Tom Rider is problematic for a lot of people, although the cause is simply that the Scala Teamset Q2 units come pre-paired with each other, and the Tom Tom wants to be paired first then the Scalas paired afterwards. Easy to fix, once you know, but the manual doesn't mention it although it does tell you how to un-pair and re-pair the Scala headsets. Still, I wasn't confident that the Zumo Scala combination wouldn't pitch me into hours of Googling for solutions and a headache.

To my astonishment it just worked. Both the Scala and the Zumo immediately saw each other and paired effortlessly, and I have never had to touch either again. As soon as I turn both on, the pairing is resumed and the digital Doris now issues her orders via the headset, overriding any other comms with pillion or another rider, or for that matter FM radio or phonecalls.

At this point I began to regard the Scala Q2's as beyond clever, verging on magic.

The success was repeated with various phones. The household Nokias and Sony Ericssons paired without problems. Not all features necessarily work though. No phone we tried could be auto-answered just by speaking into the helmet mic, it's necessary to press the Scala button that switches source manually. The call quality at the headset was better than from the phone's internal mic and speaker, but probably this won't be true at 70mph on the M25.

My own phone, an ancient Nokia 6310i, is staying paired with the Zumo GPS since that provides hands-free use in a car. It can still be used via the Scala headset, but via the Zumo screen menus. That means I lose the Scala's voice-tag calling, but I have no intention of ever using a phone on the move beyond asking the caller to hold on whilst I park in the hedge. This isn't the ultimate in customer response, but is a major improvement on diving for the kerb and pulling helmet from head and phone from pocket just in time to have missed the call.

For most people, me included, the main uses of the Scala will be GPS and intercom. I thought that after a year without voice prompts from the GPS they were unimportant, but now I can hear them I'm surprised how much less concentration has to be placed on the map display. The Zumo does occasionally have a visual stutter where the map is not updated immediately, but voice prompts continue. It's more natural, easier and safer, and I'd now be reluctant to do without sound.

Intercom on the Scala Q2 is, as far as I know, unique. Earlier Scalas had far less range. Line of sight range is at least the 500m that the manual claims, but you'll be lucky to get 100m through buildings. There's obviously a trade-off between battery power and bike-to-bike range compared to much larger and heavier FM radios which can manage 5-6x the range on open roads but not much more in built-up areas.

Radio & MP3

The Scalas include FM radio, with half a dozen storable channels. Scanning and storing these is the only operation where the simple UI becomes a liability. You will spend at least half an hour fiddling with this, or in my wife's case, failing to do it because she lost patience with pressing buttons. FM music is not very pleasant. The headset speakers have no bass and sound tinny and sharp. The limited bandwidth is good for speech clarity but music is a long way from hi-fi.

You can also connect any MP3 player to the Scala, but this is the only connection that is wired, rather than wireless, and uses a cable provided. The Zumo's built-in MP3 connects wirelessly via Bluetooth along with GPS, which is much more elegant. Either way though, sound quality is, like FM radio, a long way from good. If you're the sort of person who enjoys on-hold callcentre playback quality you will be happy. It just made me wish I could connect a decent pair of earbuds to the Scala instead of the nasty speakers.

Summary

Bike comms solutions range from simple acoustic speaking tubes that connect rider to passenger, to simple wired mic and headphone amps, to wired walkie-talkie radios that enable communications bike-to-bike as well. If you want to combine any of these with GPS, FM radio or phone use, there are integrated amplifier units which handle source switching and are permanently mounted on the bike. Typically these components are wired together and you have to connect your headset.

Whilst the Q2 Multiset costs quite a lot of money it is much cheaper than a component systems for two bikes, is completely wireless, yet provides a complete, miniature package which is overall quite brilliantly executed. Someone has really thought through the user interface and tailored it to cause minimum distraction, which is a good thing for ongoing survival.

The transmitter/receiver units are very small and light yet they are loud and clear with clean automatic gain control (AGC) that does its best to cope with an impossible environment, though like all such systems wind noise wins at over 60-70mph on a naked bike. Battery life too is better than seems reasonable from such tiny units. I've not managed to flatten them in 6hrs of use, which is what the manual claims.

There is just one issue. Riding at high speed for sustained periods without earplugs invites hearing damage, but using earplugs with the Scala is obviously counterproductive. Personally I would like to have been able to unplug the hardwired helmet speakers and connect proper in-ear headphones that would have made music listenable and cut wind noise to safe levels as well. I suspect the system would then remain intelligible to well beyond legal speeds. Scala are missing a trick here, as they could sell purpose-made bud phones with good insulation.

I expected these little lightweight plastic modules to fall considerably short of a heavy-duty wired integrated system. I thought they'd be quiet, fiddly, fragile, short on battery life, and a bit Mickey Mouse.

They're none of that. The limitations, such as they are, are minor and won't bother most riders. The bike-to-bike 500m range is fine so long as you don't get separated by 600m (are you listening, dear?). The Scala system can only support 3 headsets at once, which may be a problem for larger groups.

Against that, you gain fantastic usability, fit-and-forget portability and complete blessed freedom from wires. Overall I am astonished at how good, effective and useful the Scalas are.