It goes without saying that a racing car moving at 300+ km/h is not an ideal environment for producing a good radio signal, and that’s where Gilles’s expertise has paid off over the years.
“The most complicated thing is the radio link between the car and the pit. We have special equipment in the car, and because all the electronics must be light, it weighs around 200 grams. The driver wears earplugs, and inside the helmet we install a microphone. The microphones are very, very small – something like 5mm diameter and 2mm thickness – and extremely light.
“Speaking when the engines are on is a little bit difficult, so we use noise-cancelling technology that requires a double-face microphone. You have an opposite face, which is looking for the noise, and a face into which you talk. So you have two signals: noise and voice. The electronics inside are able to compare them and kill the noise. In the laboratory, we can have 80% suppression, although in the field it’s another question!
“In the car it’s extremely complicated, because the pressure of the noise is extremely heavy,” agrees Jose Santos
. “So the big enemy in the car is the noise. Also in the car, we have electrical problems, because the generator and the voltage regulator keep getting smaller and smaller, and therefore, from an electrical point of view, more and more noisy.
“So you have to cut first the audio noise from the microphones of the drivers, and after that, to cut the electrical noise that interferes with the radio. And when that is finished, I have mechanical noise due to the vibration. So it is not easy to have good communication with the driver for all these reasons.”
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