Wireless headset

Today I splurged on a new toy.  Previously, I had been frustrated by the complete lack of wireless headsets (bi-directional, not headphones which are listen-only), even to the point of wanting to homebrew one.  On the advice of a number of people, I also gave Bluetooth a try — unsuccessfully I might add.

Well it seems the people at Logitech have seen the need for a wireless headset for computing applications (link no longer valid).  This is the first such headset I’ve seen on the market.  It uses the 2.4GHz ISM band, using some digital mode — no idea what modulation method is used.  Apparently it’s uncompressed too, which beats A2DP.  It breaks up if you move more than 10m away (line-of-sight), which is to be expected.

Linux talks to it straight out of the box.  The dongle emulates a USB audio device, which of course is supported by the snd-usb-audio driver in ALSA.  It looks as if Logitech has taken their other headsets, and separated the ADC/DAC from the USB logic, inserting the radio link in-between… so as far as the host is concirned, it’s just a wired USB headset.

It’s not quite the holy grail I’m after… a purely analogue version would be really nice since that’d be much easier to interface with my mobile phone and radios… but this is a very nice comprimise and isn’t that expensive

I’m now happily chatting on EchoLink (on node 95092) and enjoying not being tethered to a computer. 😀

For those with a similar need, it’s definitely worth a look. 🙂