Military Communication Equipment

Military Communication Equipment

What can you say when you think of communications equipment that is bullet proof and built to last most of us think of military equipment.  Well myself as most technical people find military communications equipment fascinating but in reality military communication equipment many times is more trouble than it is worth.

In short when messing with military communications equipment many people find several reoccurring problems.

• Impedance matching or better said impedance mismatch

• Connectors and Cables

• Batteries and power supplies

• and… in the US non-FCC compliance and frequencies

As a general rule military communications equipment was designed by the military for military use and in general does not play well with commercial or consumer equipment available to many of us.  As with any rule there are always exceptions.  That being said, those exceptions are not always practical and should be considered carefully before one becomes heavily invested in military equipment.

An example are the current communications headsets in use by the military such as those made by Peltor, Sordin and others.  These headsets offer a great level of hearing protection and communications capabilities for our men and women in combat and they serve very well for shooters seeking streamlined functional hearing protection but as far as communications are concerned the military variants of these purpose designed headsets does not play well with commercial radio equipment.  The problem in a nutshell is that the microphone on the military headsets is a dynamic microphone that is low impedance (low Z) while the radio equipment is wanting the input from a electret microphone which is high impedance or (high Z).  This sounds like it is not too much trouble and if you are willing to spend money it really is not much trouble to buy adapters that will match the impedance.  The impedance matching adapters can often cost as much as the headsets themselves.