The Ural makes it easy to live without a car. It provides the ease of hauling a large amount of stuff in the cavernous sidecar. There is even room to strap stuff all over the bike although I rarely need to do that.
I had some stuff I needed to return, so I made a quick trip to the UPS store to take care of business. The Ural made it easy.
This weekend, I finished teaching another BRC (Basic Rider Course). I taught with Tom from Geezer With a Grudge, and had a good time. We enjoy going to lunch, but this was the first time we’ve been able to work together.
We normally do the classroom part on a weeknight and the range on the weekends in either an AM or PM class. Since there was no PM class, the classroom was smaller than usual, and I got to teach it solo. It was a good time.
A quick snap before the students showed up.
Saturday brought lots (and lots) of rain for the first few hours. Some of the students forgot rain gear, so they got wet. The rest of us stayed (mostly) dry.
Sunday was scorching hot with the temps soaring quickly to the mid 90s. We had a strong bunch of students, and all of them passed. One even got a perfect score. So cool. Some of them wrote some really nice things in the comments on the review form too. A fun weekend. I’ll have to sign up with more classes with Tom.
The above is a different group lined up during their skills test – stopping quickly.
You may remember that on Day 41 of Everyday for 7 Weeks, the tail and an ear fell off my wife’s helmet. The tail was helped off by the eager hands of a small child and I suspect the ear was as well. Just after taking the above picture a kid in the distance shrieked “She’s lost her EAR!!” It made me laugh.
The pieces have been safely sitting in a bag for the last several weeks patiently awaiting their reunion with the helmet (and other ear). I had an idea how to repair them, but was missing one tool on the trip to do it then. I see I also left it out of the photo below – an awl. Doh!
Originally, the tail and ears were held onto the suction cups via a thin piece of white string. The string has held strong for a couple years now. There wasn’t an easy way to re-string it, so instead I thought a sturdy ziptie might be better.
With a small push of an awl on my swiss army knife, I had an easy passage to thread the small ziptie.
With the ziptie through the tail, it was a simple matter to loop it through the hole on the suction cup and tighten it up. I used the cutters to remove the extra.
Good as new.
The ear took a couple tries to get the positioning correct. The first attempt was very floppy. Persistence won in the end, and the ear and tail have been reunited with the helmet.
An easy fix that only took a few minutes. The helmet looks much better now. I’ve grown so used to seeing the ears and tail on her helmet, she looked funny without them.
The ears and tail are made by Awesome Ears (who doesn’t appear to have a website) and imported from Europe. I originally got them at Aerostich, but they don’t seem to have them anymore. This site has them along with a decent selection of other styles.
One of the things I like about the SMH10 is that the firmware can be updated as Sena fixes bugs or adds new features. The firmware is software on the device that makes it work. For example with the April 2012 update to v4, they added 4-way intercom and 3-way phone-intercom conferencing. The 3-way phone-intercom is interesting as it means you can bring your intercom partner into the phone call. The current version right now is v4.1. You can read the release notes here for v4.1.
To update the firmware, you have to have Sena’s management software installed. To download it, you must have first registered your product which is relatively simple. It only requires a name, email, country, model, purchase date, and purchase place.
The software to update the SMH10 software is on Sena’s website here: http://www.senabluetooth.com/support/pre_download_document.php
After registering, you can enter your email address to get to the software. At the time of this writing, there is software for both Windows and OSX. I downloaded the Windows 7 64-bit version since that matches my computer. They have a very complete site with both a PDF manual for the software and videos here: http://www.senabluetooth.com/support/SMH10_Manager_Software_Manual.php
With the software I can enable and disable features in addition to updating the unit’s firmware. My units came with v4.0, so I updated them to v4.1.
The update process was simple. From the time I downloaded the software until I had both units updated was about twenty minutes. Easy.
These are the steps I followed. It looks like a lot, but again, it about twenty minutes to do it all.
I recently received the Sena SMH10D Bluetooth Stereo Headset and Intercom for Motorcycles. It was given to me to review, so I thought I’d start with a quick unboxing post. I also received a couple extra helmet clamp kits, so I can try the headset on both my modular and full face helmets. Very cool!
Inside the box was a pair of SMH10 headsets. They came paired from the factory to use immediately as an intercom. When I used headsets in the past, pairing was always a pain, so I appreciate they did that for me. It also came with a printed manual. The last piece of technology I bought just had a one page quick start with a link to their website for the real manual. It looks thick at 180 pages, but it has several languages printed. English is only the first 40 pages.
The main headset unit and speaker-microphone clamp kit. All of this will be mounted on my helmet.
The last headset I used had a proprietary charging plug. Which meant I had to lug yet another charger, this one uses micro USB. The geek in me was excited to see this. It’s the same as my cell phone! Which means, I can use the same cable/charger. One less thing to carry on a trip. The manual also mentions the firmware of the unit can be upgraded via this port.
A job dial on the side of the main unit is large and pretty easy to work with one hand. I prefer this design to style with lots of buttons. It does make the unit a bit bigger though.
The assortment of cables, mounts, and chargers. It comes with two universal wall chargers, cigarette charger, 3.5mm stereo audio cable, glued mounting adapter and extra pads.
Here are the wall charger components and the main unit.
The US style adapter goes on the wall-wart which connects to the micro USB cable to the main headset unit. Since the charger is dual voltage and connector, it is big. I’ll probably just charge off my netbook via USB or use a smaller AC-USB adapter I have.
Plugged in and charging.
I’m going to let both units charge over night even though the manual says they charge in 2.5 hours. I like to make sure new batteries are thoroughly charged before I set them working. It’ll also give me time to mount the SMH10 on my helmet which will be covered in my next post.
First impressions? Solidly built units. Sena seems to have thought about the little details such as flexible charging and future upgrades. I would have liked to have something like this on our Pacific Coast trip. My wife could have listened to Pandora while she admired the beautiful scenery. It would have also allowed us to coordinate breaks and places to stop with a bit more efficiency rather than her tapping my shoulder to get me to stop.
In the future posts I’ll cover: installing the units, upgrading firmware, and finally a review.
Today, was the 4th Annual Vintage Motorcycle Day at Motoprimo. I’ve missed the last couple due to conflicts, so it was nice to be able to attend. The flier above mentions pre-1987 bikes only. I took the oldest one I have, my 2001 SV650. It’s a bit of a long walk otherwise! Maybe someday I’ll buy an older bike, but I haven’t seen one that I have a strong desire to buy. I guess I’ll have to keep my SV until it become vintage!
When I arrived, there weren’t many bikes on display yet.
It seemed like there was just as many modern machines as vintage.
Honda had a very strong presence.
I’ve seen this one in a couple other shows. I like the color matched details.
Like the caliper and hub.
There were a couple BMWs on display as well.
But the Honda’s seemed to be winning in both the numbers and looks department.
This one had gathered some attention as well. A clean café racer.
It looks very cool sitting in the shade waiting to go for a ride.
Another BMW.
I kept coming back to the details on the Hondas.
Not vintage, but a good looking bike. I’d like to take it for a ride.
On the way back to my SV, I saw a WR250R. This one has the utilitarian Acerbis tank and it looked like happy trails racks and soft bags. I’ve been riding my WR all week; so fun.
It was a good time if not a bit small. There was about 15 bikes on display by the time I had to leave with another two dozen in the lot. More were coming as I left. Small shows like this face stiff competition with so many bikes each month at Dulono’s, but I’m glad they do it. I enjoyed chatting with some friends, and looking at the motorcycles.
