Well the title says it all doesn’t it. The Ucom Twintalker 6800 I’m describing in a previous post, has been tested on the road, while riding from London to Dover on one bike. After that we put it in the bag, and throughout our 6-day trip through France we didn’t look back or regret it even for a moment!

All of the fiddling around with the thing to make it work on the first day after buying it confirmed the very strange truth that this intercom system is really only useful if you are stationary, there is absolutely no wind noise, and the two walkie talkies are kept very close together.

As walkie talkies they work, sort of, although their range of supposedly 5km (”depending on surroundings”) in a normal urban area is reduced so much, it won’t even work until the end of the road. Another set of walkie talkies we have, by Motorola, at least worked for about 1.5km in the same town, in the same conditions, and they cost way less than these useless devices. The only problem is they have no jack to plug in a head set.

Oh and the headset is the next problem, the speakers worked fine for me, but the microphone is horrible. As soon as you ride faster than 5 mph the wind noise distorts everything you say into a muffled impossible-to-understand mumble. While testing the intercom off the bike, we could work around this sound quality issue by precisely positioning the microphones in front of our mouth, but any little wind just makes the system an absolute nightmare to use.

Riding even at 30mph through the city distorts the sound so much that even the most ridiculously articulated phrases are so torturously difficult to understand that you just don’t feel like talking anymore.

The verdict should be very clear, this is going straight into the bin!