Starcom Intercom fitting

So now that I have the unit in place I thought I'd share how the unit was fitted. The unit itself, a Starcom Advance Kit B, is located under the rear seat in the space normally reserved for the Honda toolkit. There is room for the unit plus the toolkit, but I keep my tools elsewhere so the space was free. It's held down by Velcro. The headset cables are fed forward to point C on the picture, passed inboard of the helmet hanger and through between the fairing and the seat. There's enough clearance at this point so the wires don't get pinched, and they emerge on the left side of the bike just behind the driver. For storage they are curled up under the seat. I may in the future fit sockets into the fairing, but I'm happy at the moment.

I've used two methods to power the unit.

Method 1.
I've got an Optimate battery charger/conditioner which has a lead permanently attached to the bike. This socket is visible as the white block at point A. A Tamiya battery charger plug, obtainable from most radio control model shops, was fitted to the Starcom lead which allows the Starcom unit to be powered directly from the battery. The advantage with this method was that I didn't have to try to trace a pair of wires to connect to, and I didn't have multiple wires attached to the battery terminals. The disadvantage is that power would be permanently supplied to the Starcom unit, and I'm not sure if it draws any power when it's switched off.

Method 2.
On the other side of the bike, at point B there is an identical socket which was used to power the Oxford heated grips which are fitted to the rear grab rail. This socket is spliced into the Honda quartet accessory wiring harness. On the white plug of quartet harness, the red/black wire is live, the green wire is ground. These wires are only live when the ignition is switched on. The Starcom unit is now being powered from this plug, - I'll do something else with the heated grips.

Hope that makes sense. I'm not a bike mechanic, so if you follow these instructions and end up hurting you, your bike or anyone else then I'm afraid you've only yourself to blame.

Glencoe

A good run was had by all yesterday. The Pan Clan organised a run starting from Kinross then on towards Fort William. Through Glencoe towards Tyndrum, down through Glen Ogle to Lochearnhead. It was a roasting hot day and it felt good to get the breeze. Only problem came after leaving Tyndrum when the group got split up, and didn’t regroup until near Gleneagles. Three of us were left scratching our heads trying to remember where we should go after Crieff.

On the subject of technology, the intercom is working great now, though it took a couple of stops to get the volume and microphone sensitivities set up right.

Off topic now, but it’s my blog... At one of the main beauty spots in Glencoe, and there’s loads to choose, someone had installed a statue and a memorial plaque. Now this sort of thing gets on my nerves. I’ve came out here to enjoy the scenery and someone has tried to claim our landscape with a memorial to an unknown person.

When my metabolic processes are history, I'm off the twig, have kicked the bucket, shuffled off my mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisibile I don’t want you to pollute the landscape in my memory with the sort of tasteless sculpture that gets sold off in the rejects section of a budget garden centre. And no, I don’t want a bench either - round here it would be used as somewhere to land when the Buckfast hits hard. These people are littering the hills. No it’s worse than littering, litter is thoughtless. Someone had to think up this rubbish. It’s pollution.

I can’t believe that anyone who loves the countryside would want to be remembered in this way. Whatever happened to “take only memories, leave only footprints” or is that optional? Is it OK for me to spray paint my name on the rocks? No. So it’s not all right for you to concrete, drill and chisel your memorial into a place of natural beauty. I think the right approach has been set in place with regard to Ben Nevis. See http://www.nevispartnership.co.uk/memorials.asp


I have no objection to memorials, but to spoil the landscape is taking it too far.




















And on that note, the landscape can have the final word.


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Intercom

First of all, it's good to see Alan Johnston is free. Hope the whole experience hasn't messed with his head and he is given the space to get things together.

The intercom for the bike has turned into a bit of a saga. Starcom seemed like the best solution, as so far we hadn't heard a bad word about it. When initially fitted, the sound was very clear, and it didn't take too long to get the levels set. We took a run to Glasgow and it was OK, with good clarity at legal speeds.

The next day saw us on a Pan Clan run, which was going quite well when we had an enormous feedback sound through the headsets. This was painful, and it was an effort to keep the bike upright long enough to get to the side of the road and to shut the unit off.

So off to Starcom went the unit, it was replaced and thus far we have not had a repetition. I'm still a bit iffy about using it, as that hurt. We'll see what happens over the next few runs.

In other news, some muppet pulled out in front of the car, so for the next few days/weeks we will be commuting on the bike until the insurance companies get their act together. How he didn't see me when there wasn't a cloud in the sky, on a dry clear road. I'm looking forward to the blizzard of paperwork that this will cause. I've decided not to use bad words on this blog, but I've used a few this weekend.

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