On the Road Again!

What a plum I am. I have concentrated on the battery unit end of the system looking for the charging point.  Instead it is the other end, on the leading edge of the intercom unit!!! A brief chat with Cardo Support put me straight. Hopefully that is the end of it and I can test it this week.

With twelve days before we go to Aragón I thought it might be a good idea to charge the battery unit. I checked into the zippy case it came in and there is no charging lead. No problems. It's micro-usb so any lead will fit. WRONG! The female part in the battery 🔋 unit is deeply recessed. The lead that goes from it to the intercom unit fits okay, of course. I have emailed Cardo Support to ask how I am supposed to charge the unit as there was no lead in the box. It's the weekend.... In the end I butchered one of the leads I did have to narrow the plastic surrounding the micro-usb. How long it lasts before it falls to pieces I don't know. It's working for now. Hopefully Cardo Support will come up with the proper solution. 

It's June 17th. I have actually had the SHO-1 sitting on the shelf in the conservatory since November and have had it out to check out the contents and read the installation instructions. Today I decided to fit to the Qwest and get it charged up as I might venture out on Sunday morning.  It's Father's Day here and so hopefully all the would-be GP riders will be out to lunch with their kids.   It was supposed to be designed to fit in the Qwest. It kinda does but some of the instructions can't be followed as it doesn't have removable headlining!  It says the wire from one speaker to the next needs to go under the inner lining from ear to ear. Great but the lining doesn't come out! One side has the unit fitted to it and the other the battery pack. Connecting the two is supposed to have the wire put in between the hard inner shell and the outer shell. That won't work either! The two are pretty much bonded tight. As they ought to be. After all this effing about i...

I was hoping that the reply from Cardo Support was going to be positive and from some deep storage they would have found a boom for my old Teamset. With the current boom starting to show its age and begin to look a bit frayed I'll need to opt for an alternative for the Shoei Qwest. The helmet is quite a few years old but it is still in "as new" condition. It would be a waste to buy a new helmet. Instead, I am looking at replacements for the Cardo. There are plenty of options. From the cheap and cheerful to the phenomenally expensive. I have toyed with the Cardo SHO-1 before. I like the idea that it fits less obtrusively than the old and even new style Cardo systems.  It is made for the Qwest and others in the Shoei helmet range. It being Black Friday week (!)  I found that J&S had a set at about 50% discount. So I ordered one. A couple of days to delivery.  Let's hope it is as easy to install as it looks in the pictures! https://www.webbikeworld.com/ca...

Sunday the 17th October 2021.  The Meldrews Sunday Breakfast meet incorporating Ride the World. Didn't happen. Why? The Meldrews part did and that is blogged already.  The Ride the World bit didn't. Why? To complete the challenge to ride to two places on the Overland magazine's challenge, I needed to have the TomTom fully functioning and on the bike.  I had done the groundwork. I had made sure that TomTom could communicate with the Cardo Scala fitted on my Shoei Qwest helmet. TomTom fully charged. All good. What was a stumbling block as that I had not actually foreseen nor had I checked was that the locking kit was in fact locked or maybe unlocked. There are two keys. One locks the whole shebang to the RAM ball on the bike that means the TomTom cradle is locked in place and can't be removed. The other key locks the cradle so that the TomTom can't be easily removed or it can't fly off the cradle in bumpy, possibly off road, conditions.   And yes, both were locked...

How frequently do they recommend you should replace your bike helmet? I bought my current "best" helmet, the Shoei Qwest on February 5th 2013 - EIGHT years ago today!!!!!!!! It still looks nearly new. Only the addition of the Cardo and the French law reflective stickers. It's still an argument whether the stickers are required or not. The French said yes for everyone but the EU legal service said not. So I put them on rather than have a roadside discussion with an Agent de Police. The Cardo works okay but is getting very long in the tooth. It connects to my android phone and the TomTom.  Unlike a lot of people I am happy for it not to play MP3 🎶 to me as I ride along.  As long as I get satellite navigation directions I am okay. So new helmet or not? I am feeling not at the moment.

Actually I don't know how many times I have visited and revisited the whole Cardo Scala subject. I surprised myself when doing a keyword search to find "cardo". Firstly that there were fewer blogs than I had thought and also how long ago some of them are! http://invictamoto.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/bluetooth-revisted.html - this one from August 2007. So I guess it was about time I had another crack at it. I have a TeamSet that comes with a fully functioning rider headset and a second unit with less functionality; it will connect to a phone and act as an intercom to the other unit. It comes already paired. But we were never successful getting it to fit the Caberg flip-front J1S not my Schuberth C2; the biggest white elephant of my bike gear purchases. It's heavy and despite being so fantastic it, it steams up, fogs glasses and has to be ridden with the visor cracked for any ventilation. So the legendary "quietest helmet" claim is patentl...