Intercoms in small radios
(Inflamatory remarks removed)
Also worthy of note is that many of the original radios, (XCOM excluded which has always had a VOX intercom) had a hot Mike intercom which was as good as useless so if they are talking about those intercoms I 110% agree.
The XCOM has always had a VOX intercom and I can send you a lot of feedback where customers have commented that it is the best I have ever used. It is fully integrated into the radio and requires no additional wiring or power supply, a real benefit if you need to make your aircraft as light as possible.
The XCOM radio is used a lot in training operations and several have more than 3000 hours on the clock. It would be stupid if the pilot and instructor could not talk while the aircraft was receiving, especially in the case of an emergency. There are a few intercom manufacturers who set up their intercoms this way but in my opinion it is extremely dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Communication between the pilot and passenger must not be interrupted at any stage in my opinion.
How good is the XCOM intercom, you need to wait till the rest of the US wakes up, reads the thread and then makes comment about the XCOM intercom. This will give you the confidence in knowing just how good it is.
The XCOM radio has auxiliary audio inputs for things like music input, stall warnings, UHF radios etc they almost become their own little audio panel.
Just to push the point home pilot and passenger can always talk to each other, there is no instance where they are blocked out from communication this is a no-brainer, imagine the dangers of no communication when you are training because the aircraft is receiving a signal.
The secondary audio inputs also have the standard ability to be automatically muted to 50% so with the pilot and passenger talk whilst you are listening to music the audio level reduces to 50%, if the aircraft receives another transmission the music totally mutes so you can hear the transmission and then two seconds afterwards the audio level of the music is reintroduced from a low volume up to normal. This is the normal way we supply the radio but it can be overridden so the secondary audio input has 100% volume output. This would be in a situation where you are connected into say a Dynon, a stall warning system etc and you did not want any muting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-nKk6AlWgw (note: this is a compressed movie for you Tube and the audio quality sounds very tinny compared to its normal quality because of the compression) most people describe the XCOM intercom audio as being like an FM radio station with a deep rich tone versus other intercoms which sound very scratchy and AM radio station like
Sorry, I did not mean to hijack the original thread from the MGL announcement so I think in fairness please just e-mail me directly through the xcom-usa.com website.