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.
1 comment:
You are a genius!!
I have been looking into buying a Starcom but was worried about how to power it as there is no obvious place to site the unit on my Harley Sportster.
Found your blog and set up the system last night using my permenant optimate cable from the battery. All is working fine.
What a coincedence, the whole world wide web to get advice from and I also live in Edinburgh!!
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