The problem with radios...
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Ian_Gere
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For most sites, PMR446 is just about adequate - you are rarely in need of more than 250m through medium density woodland, or 75m through 3 storey buildings. There are sites where 500mW is never going to cut it however, like Ground Zero nr. Ringwood, but the main problems there are hills and valleys, plus during the yearly mega National Airsoft Event, hundreds of people using the same channel (regardless of CTCSS, there are 3 factions which get 2 channels each, and the marshals keep a channel for themselves - it's a boot off offence to piss around on the marshals' channel or transmit on an enemy channel, if caught).
In my experience the Z-Tactical Bowman Evo II is sufficiently rugged, and just like the real thing gives you a sweaty squashed ear, but that's nothing to cry about. There is an Evo III however, with a removable boom mic, and this is naturally fraught with problems. The Comtac and Sordin replicas were always going to be problematic, because we're expecting high end audio performance from budget components and, to a degree, this is true of PTT's also... part of the reason i haven't bothered tinkering myself is that they're using Nexus jacks/sockets which are bloody expensive, even though they're bog standard chrome surface (i mean whoa... it's used in helicopters, the market must be able to bear 3 x the cost of a Neumann TRS jack eh?) and the real steel uses mini din, so there's an immediate outrageous expense when considering some kind of civilian/busted surplus repair/bodge. If you can get hold of Nexus TRRS jacks/sockets at a sensible wholesale price, you could probably help us out with a more rugged PTT and surplus headset combo.
I mean, the real deal Sordin costs £340 and that's without a PTT - I am a bit of a gear whore, but shit, there are limits! But the £80 replica is, according to many, a waste of money because it is ineffective - I am in the process of buying a 2nd hand Sordin replica so i'll soon see for meself how bad they are, but I am a sound engineer so improving what i get isn't beyond possibility - the trouble is that i expect the guts to be an undifferentiated PCB, so probably beyond my knowledge to do more than redo dodgy joints and/or improve RF shielding / mechanical attenuation (although tbh 95% of the time we are dealing with sub 130dB bangs and those fairly few and far between, not artillery, or even live fire, so that's probably not necessary).
BTW, do any military headset/handset combos use balanced audio? I'd also be very interested in what you can tell us about antennas and how we can get better performance out of our 446's.
For me the ultimate dream would be to also play music through a talkthrough system, with mixer control over the 3 sources, and if the tunes could be shared across a team, that'd be sooo cool :lol:
In my experience the Z-Tactical Bowman Evo II is sufficiently rugged, and just like the real thing gives you a sweaty squashed ear, but that's nothing to cry about. There is an Evo III however, with a removable boom mic, and this is naturally fraught with problems. The Comtac and Sordin replicas were always going to be problematic, because we're expecting high end audio performance from budget components and, to a degree, this is true of PTT's also... part of the reason i haven't bothered tinkering myself is that they're using Nexus jacks/sockets which are bloody expensive, even though they're bog standard chrome surface (i mean whoa... it's used in helicopters, the market must be able to bear 3 x the cost of a Neumann TRS jack eh?) and the real steel uses mini din, so there's an immediate outrageous expense when considering some kind of civilian/busted surplus repair/bodge. If you can get hold of Nexus TRRS jacks/sockets at a sensible wholesale price, you could probably help us out with a more rugged PTT and surplus headset combo.
I mean, the real deal Sordin costs £340 and that's without a PTT - I am a bit of a gear whore, but shit, there are limits! But the £80 replica is, according to many, a waste of money because it is ineffective - I am in the process of buying a 2nd hand Sordin replica so i'll soon see for meself how bad they are, but I am a sound engineer so improving what i get isn't beyond possibility - the trouble is that i expect the guts to be an undifferentiated PCB, so probably beyond my knowledge to do more than redo dodgy joints and/or improve RF shielding / mechanical attenuation (although tbh 95% of the time we are dealing with sub 130dB bangs and those fairly few and far between, not artillery, or even live fire, so that's probably not necessary).
BTW, do any military headset/handset combos use balanced audio? I'd also be very interested in what you can tell us about antennas and how we can get better performance out of our 446's.
For me the ultimate dream would be to also play music through a talkthrough system, with mixer control over the 3 sources, and if the tunes could be shared across a team, that'd be sooo cool :lol:
Chock
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- Sep 2, 2014
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Most of the sights you see on airsoft weapons might look like the real deal, but very few actually are, they are usually cheaper knockoffs. As you point out - real military scopes are calibrated for the range of the real weapons they are intended to be used with (which is probably three to four times the range that a typical airsoft weapon is likely to be engaging at, so would be fairly pointless on an airsoft weapon, and, they are prohibitively expensive compared to a knockoff copy with the correct calibration. For example, a surplus Warsaw Pact PSO-1 scope is going to be a few hundred quid at least, whereas I got a knock off copy of one to put on my airsoft SVD Dragunov which has the same reticule engravings as the real PSO-1, but calibrated for airsoft ranges. That cost less than fifty quid, which is just as well, because even the open sights on an SVD are calibrated for 1,200 metres, so a genuine scope for it would be useless.
So why am I pointing this out?
The fact that a Chinese company has gone to the trouble of making a replica PSO-1 scope specifically for an airsoft SVD Dragunov sniper rifle, tells us a couple things worth noting: That airsofters will certainly pay for an alternative version of some military kit which looks authentic, even if it isn't actually that authentic. So there is a market there for the right product, but, people don't want to pay too much for that gear, and are probably more concerned with the look of stuff - i.e. the 'pose value' of it - rather than an exact replication of the functionality.
Where PMR radios are concerned, yes they aren't generally as sturdy as military equipment, nor do they have the range and sophistication of it either. But let's be honest, when we are dressing up as toy soldiers to run about with our toy guns, we are not going to be contacting a Forward Air Controller in a USAF OV-10 Bronco orbiting thirty miles away from us, so he can direct a napalm strike on Milton Keynes, and we are not going to die if our radios go U/S, so they are a useful aid, but nowhere near as critical as they are in real military operations. So a PMR radio is generally enough for what we need. But airsofters are still going to want that PMR to at least look authentic when they are using it, so really, about the only requirement for most airsofters, would be stuff like Bowman and Liberator headsets ready to plug into PMRs, because the PMR is likely to be stuffed in a tactical vest or webbing pocket somewhere. After all, I'm all for a bit of realism on my Vietnam soldier load out, but I don't want that quest for authenticity to extend to lugging a 25 pound AN/PRC-25 radio around on my back, when i can get that kind of look by simply having an H-250 handset with a polythene bag over it, plugged into a tiny PMR.
Much of that stuff is available in replica form, but there are already people doing conversions of the real equipment commercially, so I'd look at undercutting those enterprises if I were you (since you said it was more of an interest than a means to keep a roof over your head), because in spite of the fact that airsofters don't want to pay a lot, I suspect they probably would pay a bit more (within reason) for a genuine headset which could be easily plugged into their PMR, knowing it wasn't going to fall to bits in a matter of weeks, especially if you were able to make it a bespoke service.
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