As promised, the phones showed up today. Here's some facts and observations based on a very limited time in use. First of all, they are light weight and appear well-made. The batteries are Lithium with a advertised charge time of 2 hours from a depleted state and a run time of 8 hours. Nowadays 8 hours is longer than my knees will let me hunt. Both batteries can be charged at the same time with the included USB cable. The cable can be connected to your computer USB port or, in my case, I plugged it in to the USB port in my truck and let them charge while I ran errands. The transmitter works on 2.4 Ghz which means no interference is likely. The transmitter and receiver are "paired" to each other and therefore ignore outside signals. The "pairing" procedure takes seconds and you only have to do it once. Transmission range is 8 meters which is lot longer than my arm. One thing I'll warn you about. The instructions could be better. I muddled my way through charging and set up mostly based on having used other Bluetooth type gadgets. Basically, charge the two batteries, insert the transmitter into the headphone jack on the detector, turn on transmitter, push in and hold the On/Off/Volume switch on the headset until it starts flashing green rapidly then release. When the flashing becomes a steady green the two units are paired. Turn on your detector and start detecting. Remember that the pairing only has to be done once. From now on you will simply turn on the detector, transmitter, and headphones to get started.
At this point I'm going to remind everyone that I use an E-trac and everything I say from here on is specific to that detector using the wireless headphones. The headphones are supposed to work with any detector with a standard headphone jack but I haven't tried any other make or model. Since the headphone jack on the E-trac is at the far rear of the unit and basically under your elbow, the transmitter does not get in the way. I suppose I could manage to damage it if I really tried but I'm not worried about it. Short of me dropping the detector and it landing directly on the transmitter I think I'm okay. Lag time. There doesn't seem to be any. Everything seems to be exactly the same as what I'm accustomed to with regular wired headphones but then I use a pretty slow sweep speed with the E-trac. I can set the volume on the headphones to a threshold I'm comfortable with. I will note that the target tones themselves (I use multi-tones) don't sound quite "right". Not bad, just not exactly what I'm used to hearing. I'm sure I'll learn these "new" tones just as I had to learn the ones in the wired phones. Or maybe I just need to experiment with settings. Regardless, this was my first experience in 40+ years of detecting where I used wireless headphones. In my young years I didn't use phones at all but age and progressive hearing loss have made them almost a necessity for the past few years. Between the feather like weight on my head and no coiled wire connecting me to the detector like a leash, I almost felt like a kid again. I like these things!
Storm
