So, previously I’ve tried looking for a suitable earmuff headset, and drew blanks: they wanted $400+ for them and I wasn’t willing to spend that much. That said, there are times when such a headset is useful: if it’s raining heavily on the roof of the annex, hearing the radio is bloody difficult!
Now, my tactical headset should fulfil that, but really it was intended for less noisy environments. What if that’s not enough? Years ago, Brisbane WICEN used to help out with the car rallies, and there you really do need something that will muffle outside noise. I had tried to make my own, with limited success, but one wondered how the commercial options compared.
The other day, I spotted this earmuff headset. One thing I note, the seller seems unaware of how these things are worn — that’s a neck band fellas, not a head band. (Or maybe their ears are wider than they are tall? Mine are taller than they are wide.)
This is up the upper limit of what I was willing to spend, but what the hell… we’ll try it. They arrived today (about 6 days ahead of schedule). They’re comfortable enough — sound dampening is reasonable. I like the fact the microphone is on the right side. There’s a PTT button on the left ear-cup and a volume control on the right.
Being a behind-the-head design, it plays nice with my hard hat too. The head strap is a little tricky in my case, since my hard hat has a chin strap — I figured out I had to undo the head strap, thread the headset through the chin strap, then put hard hat and headset on together. I should be able to wear it with the coolie hat as well.
A downside is basically when I do this, I can’t take the headset off without taking the hard hat off too, but the intent of this was something that I was going to leave on anyway, and the same criticism is true of the tactical headset too.
One wrinkle is that this headset you can see, uses a Kenwood-style pin-out — my Kenwood TH-D72A died recently, so great timing there. Luckily for us though, it’s just a small pigtail: we can make our own up to suit this pin-out. The pig-tail actually is a 6-pin Mini-DIN: Jaycar part number PP0366. I was thinking of chopping cables, but this is even simpler, we’ll just make our own pigtail.
At the other end, it appears to be a 5-pin mini-XLR, but I haven’t tried buzzing that out at this stage. As is typical with comms headsets, this one is mono. There’s a 3.5mm jack (left earcup) for plugging in a comms receiver or media player, and it works — in mono. The microphone appears to be an electret.
For now, I’ve decided to have a look at reverse-engineering the pin-out to use the headset as-is. I rummaged around and found the aforementioned connector in my junk box, still sealed in its packet, so I opened that up, and used the little insert inside to plug into the socket, put the headset on, and went buzzing with the multimeter. Using the Kenwood pigtail for clues (since I know the Kenwood pin-out), I located the PTT, speaker and microphone connections on the headset cable.
One pin appears to be a no-connect; the PTT and microphone are commoned.
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