Welcome back!

Talk about motorcycle intercom systems in our circle of friends and I can guarantee most of the men will grumble about the idea of “her indoors” being able to talk to them whilst they are on the bike, their last haven of quiet if you will.
Discussions then normally continue along the lines of that they must have the wrong woman (ahem).

A-n-y-w-a-y, we have experimented before with a cheap intercom system on our beloved Boris the Ural Sidecar outfit and it worked pretty well and we had a lot of laughs and decided it would definitely be something we would look into further with a view to getting a better system.

At last years’ NEC bike show Autocom were selling their intercom systems at half price and they are currently advertising that price again, so I thought it would be worth talking about our experience with the Pro-Duo kit.

As our holiday in Cornwall at the beginning of September was looming we thought we would get the intercom ready for use, yeah I know better late than never. So we set about fitting it to our respective helmets and onto the bike.

The instructions provided with the kit are extremely easy to follow and they recommend having a dry run with the kit before making any permanent alterations to the lining of your helmet.

Pete likes to wear an open face helmet and you can see his part of the system fitted into his helmet in the picture on the left. He found it extremely easy to fit. There is an extra piece of electrickery that you can fit if the rider wears a full-face helmet,

which is a kind of mini microphone that adjusts the volume of the rider and passenger microphones to compensate for the wind noise detected. We however decided not to use this as we figured that the noise detected would be likely quite high with an open face and in hindsight I feel we made the right choice.

The fitting of the system to my full-face helmet was slightly trickier but only because none of the lining in my helmet is detachable and therefore we had to tuck the wires and the speakers inside the best we could.

The fitting to the bike was also extremely easy and for the purpose of our recent holiday we had a tank bag on the bike and the bottom half has a clear plastic map holder on the top, so with the two halves zipped together this made a useful compartment for the black box of tricks, sorry, main controls. The instructions say that you can fix the main controls to the bike but we prefer to have it portable for use on other bikes.

We travelled over 300 miles each way with regular stops and of course taking our helmets off and putting them on. We could hear each other clearly at all speeds and despite the onslaught of the sort of rain any sensible person should definitely not be riding in! When Pete’s microphone got a bit soggy it was a bit crackly but given the sheer volume of rain we can’t really grumble at that. We plan to fit the unit into my helmet more permanently because at the moment the wires are only fixed with the stick-on Velcro supplied in the kit, which did tend to come unstuck when removing my helmet.

You can also listen to music and receive mobile phone calls via the Autocom Pro and it is expandable for bike-to-bike communication and GPS.

So, the verdict? Well we are very impressed with it, it is easy to use and does the job brilliantly and I feel we really put the system through its paces.

For more information and a list of dealers click here for Autocom’s website