Headset with boom mike on the cheap

I spend at least a couple hours most Sunday evenings on the radio participating in a couple of local nets.  And since my "shack" is the livingroom that I share with my lovely bride, I needed to find a way for us to be able to co-exist in that space at the same time without either of us driving the other crazy.  So headphones were in order.  I've actually got some very nice pairs of stereo headphones.  But they kept getting tangled in the mic cord.  So I decided I wanted a headset with an attached mic.

There are lots of very nice commercial communications headsets.  But being on the limited budget that I am, I opted for a slightly different route.  There are many very affordable gamers headsets for computers.  And actually, the ones that have separate mic and headset connections are much less expesive than the USB variety.  The ones with the mic/headset connectors are the ones we want.  The thing about computer headsets is that they almost all expect the mic connection to be powered since they use an electret-condenser type mic element.

If your radio uses a similar type of microphone, then this style of headset will work for you as well.  What you will need is a resistor and a capacitor.  In the mic connector, you'll likely find some sort of power avaialble.  In my ICOM, it as +8vdc.  You wire the resistor from the positive voltage to the tip of the microphone, and then the capacitor from the tip to the mic input on the radio.  You'll also need some sort of PTT switch.

In my case, I had the wiring harness from an extremely old Telex headset that I owned back in the 70's.  The headset is long gone, but the harness has a very nice PTT switch assembly.  So I scavenged that from my junk box and started wiring.  Here's pictures of the results.

 

 

What you see:  An inexpensive Turtle Beach gamers headset and the harness I use to hook it up to my radio.  The harness consists of an 8 pin microphone connector, and from that is a wire that is long enough to reach around the back of the radio and plug into the external speaker jack.  The oddly shapped thing close to the other end of the cable is the PTT switch.  From that is 2 3.5mm trs inline jacks.  One for the mic, one for the headset.  Since all mic connector wiring is different, you would need to look up the wiring diagram for your specific radio.  But the addition of the resistor and capacitor makes the whole thing work like a champ.  I get great signal reports whenever I use it.

That's enough for today.

73
Steve
KDØWSW