BT getting suppressed by "modern cars" and then some...

ST1100Y

ST1100Y

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ST1100 50,000 Mile Badge
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Vienna, AuSTria
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ST1100Y, ST1100R
I kinda start to regret removing my wired Autocom ProM1... 🙄
(yeah, had to, as PMR radios started to fail as well due the impact of "technology progress"...)

Last week I roll out the sub-level garage, my SENA SLR-II nicely receiving tunes from the SENA FreWire ...
At a red light I'd to stop behind one of those oversized Mercedes SUV's... driver starts to punch around on his dumb-phone...
and almost instantly my music reception starts suffering dropouts, which lasted until we went on and I managed to pass that housewife-tank...
Once I got ahead of that car, suddenly my music was fully clear again...

Similar odd experiences during the weekend ride...
On the solitary, rural roads all is fine and undisturbed...
But while crossing through the various villages, I get odd, random dropouts of the music playback...
And I can't pinpoint if that origins from parked cars, smart TVs/stereos inside the homes, or the omnipresent, domestic WLAN routers... :unsure:

Same on Bike 2 Bike intercom...
excellent out in the open...
random distortions within inhabited areas...
getting stuck in dense traffic between "oh so modern" cars, and you might not even hear each other over a 3 ft distance... :cautious:

To me it seems that especially the MFG's of high priced, luxury vehicles totally ignore any FCC regulations... EVs in particular... 🙄
 
ST1100Y said:
To me it seems that especially the MFG's of high priced, luxury vehicles totally ignore any FCC regulations... EVs in particular... 🙄
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I'm not surprised there is RF interference from EVs. Considering the electronics aboard to regulate and control the current to two or more motors it is a wonder that every EV is not causing reception problems.
 
SMSW said:
I'm not surprised there is RF interference from EVs. Considering the electronics aboard to regulate and control the current to two or more motors it is a wonder that every EV is not causing reception problems.
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Considering the efforts to shield & noise-filter the outdoor units* of modern air-conditioners, with Inverter driven compressors, to pass our EMC regulations, car MFG's simply have the deeper pockets then... :unsure:
(* we had to request/bring certificates that proof full compliance with pacemakers and such...)
 
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Al st1100 said:
Europe/EU has an FCC ??? :confused1:
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I used an, for you fellas understandable abbreviation... ;)
They actually call it Radio Equipment Directive, AKA RED...
single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu

Radio Equipment Directive (RED)

Regulatory framework for placing radio equipment on the EU market, telecommunication conformity assessment and market surveillance committee, and guidance.
single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
 
There have been a couple times where my daughter's boyfriend has had to borrow our car. We both head into the city early, he for work, me for a swim. My phone is paired to my Cardo but also the car. Whenever we ended up driving in near each other, my phone would skip from my Cardo to the car which meant that he was now listening to my music and I only had dead air. Generally required me speeding up a bit to get out of the zone of contact with the car. Irritating yet amusing.
 
After picking up my Neotec II and hooking up a SENA SLR to it, back in like summer of 2019, I found that I hated the SLR. due to trying to find the "buttons" to get the volume up or down. So I bought one of the SENA "Wrist" controllers for it and it did much better for me. Until I had to ride out to Sacramento in January of 2022. I had forgotten to charge the SLR overnight and after about 100 miles I started getting the Low Battery from the unit. I stopped, plugged it in to my portable battery, like I always did for my SENA 30Ks, and it wouldn't work, while charging! So, basically after that trip, I shelved the Neotec II and went back to my Neotec with the 30K on it.

The story continues.... :rolleyes-2x:

Last Summer, my boys decided we needed to take another ride like we did in 2014. To prepare for it, I picked up a set of SENA 50Ss, so we could all communicate. Not being able to communicate, was a major issue with the ride back in 2014.

So I gave my set 8 year old 30Ks to my son Brett and told him to bring both on the trip. That worked great for us. But on the trip, my Neotec decided to really irritate my ear, so when I got back, I decided I needed the Neotec II working for me. This meant I needed to attach one of the 50Ss to it. So I modified it so I could use the 50S, and not have it mounted, almost to the rear of the helmet. (Which I didn't like about it) My modification, worked pretty good and I used that helmet for my ride to WeSTOC 29, out in Colorado. It worked great.

Then TUB JACKSON came out with an adapter for the Neotec II and SENA 50S, so I bought one of those and mounted it it works even better than my mod.

So, now I can use my Neotec II with my SENA 50S and enjoy it's features that I like to use.

My point to all of this? So if you are using a Neotec II, throw away the SLRs and check into TUB JACKSON and go with the SENA 50S. :unsure-2x:
 
I'm no BT expert, but I've found that at least modern phones tend to remember how often they pair with different devices, the devices themselves not so much. A lot of vehicles and devices these days default to "open pairing" that will try to pair with almost anything that's nearby. So it can be playing in your ear and then it'll get pinged by someone else's phone or car to pair up. Most ppl (including moi) don't know how to disable that, and cheaper electronics simply allow it.

SENA obviously doesn't fall into the cheap category, but the interference is still there as regulations (FCC at least) require their class has to accept any outside interference and cannot interfere with certain other eqpt classes. What those other classes are, I don't know, presumably more "important" ones than just chit-chatting or music.

So, both of those scenarios are plausible IMO. I can compare it to trying to use an older radar detector on today's roads. I sometimes run my Escort SOLO (ancient) and It will pick up EVERYTHING: po-po, storefronts, radar-avoidance and laser-ranging systems of cars, you name it. They all work on the same frequencies so it doesn't know any better. Thankfully our local 5-oh isn't as interested in catching speeders...some would argue they're not interested in catching anything. But I digress....
 
jdmccright said:
I'm no BT expert, but I've found that at least modern phones tend to remember how often they pair with different devices, the devices themselves not so much. A lot of vehicles and devices these days default to "open pairing" that will try to pair with almost anything that's nearby. So it can be playing in your ear and then it'll get pinged by someone else's phone or car to pair up. Most ppl (including moi) don't know how to disable that, and cheaper electronics simply allow it.

SENA obviously doesn't fall into the cheap category, but the interference is still there as regulations (FCC at least) require their class has to accept any outside interference and cannot interfere with certain other eqpt classes. What those other classes are, I don't know, presumably more "important" ones than just chit-chatting or music.
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Being battery powered the SENA will likely also have a rather low-power transmitter, so despite Hedi Lamar's genius concept it'll be just drowned by any on board powered BT-broadcast, like the "entertainment center" of a bloody car nearby, or a home's WLAN router... all on that 2,4-GHz-ISM-Band...

The weirdest incident happened last year up in Scotland:
taking a break, somewhere in the woods so literally nowhere, and my SRL-II suddenly voices [PAIRING REQUEST DENIED!]... wut?! :oops: (a voice prompt that isn't even listed in the SRL-II manual...)
The only "thing" nearby was a mountain biker passing by, with a fairly large rugged phone/tablet mounted on the handlebar which, as you said, must have had its "open pairing" active, which my SENA repulsed...

Whilst the drop outs are kinda annoying, am I actually amazed that BT is working at all, with all those dumb-phones, earpieces, car hands free kits, E-scoots & E-Bikes (all have APP control) in close vicinity most of the time...

What I don't understand though, is the ideology to prioritize the darn phone connection over everything else on a motorcycle intercom?!
Sorry, but when I'm riding/on the road my focus is entirely elsewhere, then receiving a stupid phone call or being notified about having received a text or email... pfffff...
(same nonsense on current GPS/satnav units as well as the motorcycle TFT instrument clusters with AndroidAuto/CarPlay, also there the phone overrides everything else... 😒)
 
ST1100Y said:
What I don't understand though, is the ideology to prioritize the darn phone connection over everything else on a motorcycle intercom?!
Sorry, but when I'm riding/on the road my focus is entirely elsewhere, then receiving a stupid phone call or being notified about having received a text or email... pfffff...
(same nonsense on current GPS/satnav units as well as the motorcycle TFT instrument clusters with AndroidAuto/CarPlay, also there the phone overrides everything else... 😒)
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Hey, those telemarketers HAVE to get through to you because your vehicle warranty is about to expire ... ;)
 
Something that I had, and for the life of me I can't remember what it was, had the ability to allow the user to enter the priority of the Bluetooth connections and they would connect in the priority that was inputted. It also allowed the used the option to enter whether the # 1 priority should take precedence over all other connections with all other paired devices. This meant that if I listed my GPS as having priority # 1 and that I wanted it to always take precedence it would connect to my GPS whenever it was in range. Even if it was already connected to something else it would disconnect and connect to the GPS. As long as the GPS was connected it would ignore all other connection requests.
 
Andrew Shadow said:
Something that I had, and for the life of me I can't remember what it was, had the ability to allow the user to enter the priority of the Bluetooth connections and they would connect in the priority that was inputted. It also allowed the used the option to enter whether the # 1 priority should take precedence over all other connections with all other paired devices. This meant that if I listed my GPS as having priority # 1 and that I wanted it to always take precedence it would connect to my GPS whenever it was in range. Even if it was already connected to something else it would disconnect and connect to the GPS. As long as the GPS was connected it would ignore all other connection requests.
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If there only would be such a setting within the SENA Motorcycles App... ;)
But also in their idiology the darn phone has priority... :cautious:

And since a SENA BT intercom can handle only exactly two full BT channels, the pairing for my FreeWire stereo interface gets dropped in favor of the phone... I can still activate the PTT bike 2 bike though, but any incoming call or [text message received] beep instantly overrides that connection as well... 🙄
(an entertaining episode when ze GF had unintentionally activated BT on her Samsung (which of course was stored out of reach inside the topcase...), being fully convinced she's talking to me on bike2bike, while in real she was shouting at her dad who had coincidentally called just that very moment, thus got yellet at that she's ready to leave the parking lot now... hectically waving at me stopped a bit further ahead... :laugh:)

For me quite useless as I a) don't intent taking any calls while riding and b) for odd reasons no audio prompts are given while navigating via Google maps (i.e. to a B&B or hotel) on the phone (weird that the phone keeps blaring out the internal speaker whilst the SENA is paired as [headset]... :unsure:)
 
ST1100Y said:
If there only would be such a setting within the SENA Motorcycles App... ;)
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Is there such a setting in the app? I use my Sena almost exclusively for navigation instructions when I am in unfamiliar city environments and for bike-to-bike the odd time. I did install the app on my phone and I looked at it a couple of times and I didn't see any added value to it for the way that I use my Sena so I have ignored it since.
 
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