Budget vs High End Comms : How to set it all up

The first thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter how fancy your radio setup is if you don’t know how to use your radio. Spend the time with a cheap inexpensive radio to learn if you even like it, use it, or are interested in HAM and the licenses.

Everything we show here uses an inexpensive Baofeng radio. This is a radio anyone can purchase and is a great radio to learn on and grow out of. Starting with some super high end radio is not needed and is mostly elitist nonsense. Learn and outgrow your radio and pass it on to someone else on your team so you gain knowledge together.

The first setup we look at is just a radio. That’s it. Just a radio in a pouch. This system is extremely basic but it’s also cheap and effective. You have radio comms…but that may be about it. This setup isn’t convenient and also makes using your radio or hearing your radio quite difficult.

We then take things up a level and move into an earpiece and microphone setup. This setup allows you to connect the mic cords into the two-prong connectors on your radio. The earpiece is then placed in your ear and under your hearing protection. Now you have the ability to hear your radio and interact with a pushbutton mic, but our ability to hear is now cut in half. With the radio mic jammed in our ear, any fancy multi-directional headsets are now just wasted.

So we take things up another level and add in a setup from Comm gear supply. Now, this setup is similar to our previous setup but includes various upgrades. The first is that the entire system can use a QD setup that allows you to connect to various radios. We also ditch the ear piece and use a 2 pin connector that can also take an adapter to a 3.5mm. This allows you to connect almost all commercially available active hearing protection headsets. You’ve not got your multidirectional hearing back with a system that fully integrates the radio and hearing protection in one.

Going up just one more level, we connect the Baofeng into a Push to talk, or PTT for short. The PTT used to connect to the baofang uses a kenwood style connector to the radio and a U94 connector to go into our headset. You can also sub in a PTT that uses 5 pin connectors in the same location if you’re looking to connect into military style radios.

The u94 connector on the PTT is important because that is the down lead connector from our Tea Hi-threat headset with an integrated microphone. The Hi-threat headsets can also quickly and easily swap from the helmet to the headband mount in seconds by using the screws on the side of the headset. The integrated comms on the headset removes a LOT of the wire mess that is involved in many of the previous setups and makes an insanely efficient and usable system.

Hopefully, by seeing some of the different comms setups available, you have a better understanding of what will work best for you and your needs. And how to put it all together!

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Music by: @Barren Gates