Adding a car-to-car and car-to-spotter communication system is something that can both make sprint racing even more fun, and give you a real competitive advantage . For Endurance racing, comms are essential. However, Radio systems on the market are WAY more expensive than my budget would allow. After borrowing and testing cheap radios from a friend, I went forward with piecing together a cheap system for about $150 total. The results were impressive but I constantly struggled to broadcast out of my car without anything but the sound of my screaming engine. Thankfully, I found an “Easy button” kit to have great sounding audio and still keep an entire setup under $250.
Legal Note: Even cheap and easily purchasable radios have the power to broadcast on radio bands reserved for emergency services, CERTAINLY make sure you do not do that (Ours did arrive set within the amateur frequencies). To operate radios you should have some level of an amateur radio license (A basic license can require forking over a few bucks to the government, to advanced licenses with full tests.) There are rumors of a possibility of government deregulation, but I’m not yet holding my breath for it.
Getting a system together without spending a fortune:
The problem with in-car radio systems is the extremely high cost. Typical “Name Brand” systems seem to start at $700 and go up to (and well beyond) $1500. If you are racing on a budget (Be it with NASA, SCCA, Champcar, LeMons, etc) a $1500 radio is just out of the question. I’m sure there are some very high quality setups out there, but I just couldn’t imagine they were THAT much better than some cheap generic radio with pieced together accessories. On top of that, I’ve seen plenty of people with big money, name brand kits struggling to get them to work.
Nobody online seemed to have done a super-cheap setup before. There were a few posts of people asking and being told “no, no, that would never work!” but I couldn’t find anyone who actually tried it and failed.
I was able to get a HIGH QUALITY car-to-car, and car-to-spotter radio setup for less than $250.
After a few years, the system continues to work great. The only spot that had given us trouble initially was communication out of my car. It’s quite loud Inside a car constantly at Wide Open Throttle, 5-7,000 rpm. I initially tried using a standard generic earbud mic, but all the other side could hear was engine noise. I added a lapel mic and clip it inside my balaclava, and it improved output sound quality a bit, but my voice was still so garbled it was barely usable. If your car doesn’t have the “angry bee” buzz of a revvy, rattling Spec Miata, this may not be an issue at all. The good news is I found an affordable option from Nerdie Racing that covers everything you need, including a good mic. At $150 it’s a bit more expensive than piecing together parts from Amazon, but not much… and it works.
Range has been super impressive. The biggest single concern people voiced to me was that without spending big money on super powerful radio units we would have terrible range and most tracks would work for only a few turns. Even with my cheap $25 trunk lid mounted antenna and $10 spotter antenna, We have had mostly flawless results all across tracks in the Northeast. Even the sprawling Watkins Glen has spotter reception everywhere but in the toe of the boot.
Parts List:
Here are the main parts of the kit I pieced together: Items on amazon change availability and price often, please let me know if you notice any unavailable products! I try to stay on it finding and replacing similar parts. The Nerdie kit does GREATLY simplify your “shopping list”, but if you are someone who really wants to tinker and try the cheap route, I’ve retained the old links below.
**Note: If you order through these links to Amazon, I earn a small percentage off the sale, You’ll be helping to support this blog and it’s content (And it doesn’t cost you anything extra)… so please use the links, thank you!
If you order directly from Nerdie Racing, please leave a note in the comment box that you heard about them on No Money Motorsports!
1) 2 BaoFeng UV-5R Radios (One for in-car, one for spotter)
Note: The UV-5R Radios seem to come and go frequently from amazon, I’ll do my best to keep an updated amazon link. Try to avoid the “plus” model as the metal front cover can interfere with the plug. The GT-5R seems to be the “new for 2021” radio, and is purposely limited on channels. This is a good thing as we don’t need to broadcast out of that range.
BaoFeng UV-5R Radio 
2) Antenna for the Car
***Important note: If you are planning on joining a specific radio frequency, make sure the antenna you do end up purchasing works for that range.
3) Nerdie Racing “NASCAR SYSTEM” Helmet Kit. I had previously been piecing together cheap individual pieces (Mics, push-to-talk buttons, extensions, etc) but for only a few dollars more, this system not only works great, it’s MUCH higher quality pieces that should last much longer. For cars with multiple drivers, additional helmet kits can be added for just $25-30.
*If you purchase this system, please leave a note in the checkout that you found them on No Money Motorsports!
At this point, you can stop: You will have a functional system for LESS than $200
However, the next few pieces will go a long way in making your system function better and be more fool proof.
4) Battery Eliminator (While this isn’t required, hardwiring the radio to the car’s power saves me from forgetting to charge the radio… I have seen plenty of competitors not realize their battery was dead until they are rolling to grid)
Battery Eliminator for Baofeng Radio
5) Spotter Antenna. Standard antenna should be fine for small tracks, but I figured with how cheap antennas are, it was good insurance. My exact antenna doesn’t seem to be sold anymore but this one is very close
6) Spotter Earpiece. It gets really loud at the track, and you don’t necessarily want people around you hearing what’s being said, so some sort of headphones is good for a spotter as well. I’m considering spending the money on a full earmuff style headset, but so far a cheap setup like this has worked well.
Cheaper option:
Baofeng Black PTT Earpiece Earphone Headset Mic
Other Misc Items:
- “Radio Boxes” are prohibitively expensive (Around $50 for a metal box, some foam, and a roll cage mount). You can’t just sit a radio in the passenger seat, some sort of holder is important. I also wanted to minimize vibrations from the car getting to the radio, so bolting it directly to the chassis was out. I used an old metal tea box, shoved some soft packing foam in it, and attached it to my cage via u-bolts.
- I mounted a Dual Cigarette Lighter Plug
to the cage near the radio to get power. The open plug is also was a convenient way to get power to my cameras. (Check out my post on recycling your old cell phones for trackday cameras!)
to the cage near the radio to get power. The open plug is also was a convenient way to get power to my cameras. (
Good luck, let me know how it turns out for you!
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For those who are incessant, tinkering cheapos (much like myself) who STILL want to try and make this system work as cheap as possible, here are links. After seeing how improved the quality and results were with the Nerdie Racing Kit, I personally do not recommend the piece-it-together route… After spending money on several mics, adapters, and several lengths of wire, I would have been much better off just going with the Nerdie kit from the beginning.
1A) PTT (Push-To-Talk) Kit (The PTT button is on a bit shorter of a wire than I hoped and with my layout it doesn’t reach my steering wheel, but it reaches my shifter just fine)
BTECH 2 Pin (K1 Connector) to 3.5MM Adapter with Push-to-Talk Button
2) Headphone extension cable (Gives me plenty of wire to run the wire to a convenient spot for hooking the in-car system to the wire coming off me) Depending where you want your helmet hookup, you may be able to get a significantly shorter cable.
3) Microphone (earbud microphones weren’t good enough, These were a small improvement but still weren’t up to the task of filtering out the various noises of a racecar)
Lavalier Microphone with headphone jack
4) Generic Earbuds (without an inline microphone would be nice, I just taped over my earbud mic because I’m using the lapel mic). You can use fancy noise-canceling earbuds as well, but they seemed unnecessarily expensive and any generic ones seemed to muffle my loud exhaust just enough when under a helmet. Get ones that are relatively flat so they fit snugly under the helmet without being uncomfortable.
5) Input Splitter. Depending on which mic and earbuds you go with, you may need a splitter so you can plug both your mic and earbuds into the PTT adapter. (Hat tip to Steve for pointing out that I missed this!)
Great article! Just an FYI, prices seem to have gone up quite a bit, the cost on this system now is nearly $300.
Thanks! I’m not quite seeing $300 unless you wanna totally go all out. Can be up and running in-car under $200 and about $250 with a spotter radio.
Thank you
currently it appears the BaoFeng UV-5R radio link is not working.
Thanks for the heads up, I added a new one. It’s tough to keep an active link for these things!
Can you update the 8w version link as it appears to not be functional , Great write up and This is exactly what I wanted. I would like to be able to communicated car to car and with a spotter so all three are on same channel. Would this set up work for that?
Will do, Thanks for the heads up! Those listings change so often it’s hard to keep up!
That would definitely work, most races we have about 5 cars and a spotter on the one channel.
It is hard to believe that this will work, but I’ll have to say that I can’t afford the crazy dollars these other companies are asking for so I’m going to give it a shot.
What specific part are you most concerned about?
At this point we’ve had 4 guys running this exact layout for about 4 years (they started with the Nerdie kit, I finally came ok board this year).
Ironically, the only people in our circle who have had issues are ones with name brand radios and parts.
I totally understand though, I was shocked when it worked out so well, haha.
I have installed this setup in my race car. We have 4 drivers. 2 with Roux helmets with build in comms and 1 with nerdie digital mic harness. It’s all fine in the pits when we do a check but as soon as we are on track we cannot understand what is said even if the car is passing is less than a 100 yards away… what could be the issue
That’s odd, I haven’t heard that one. Try a new channel?
Seems like a transmit issue more than a mic issue, do your antennas work for your frequency? How far are you when checking/testing?
Great information, thanks a lot! My concern is about the range of the radio, I had friends that tried the baofeng radio but does not seem to get the right range (I actually dont know if they used the improved antennas you recomended)…. FYI im from brazil and the track that we will use the radio more often is interlagos, witch has the boxes barier from the rest of the track.
My main concern is that for us the price tag get up a lot by our currency, even more considering that nerdie does not ship world wide, and I will have to use a company to receive the product and than send it here. For us china is a lot cheaper but i didnt find the setup quite as you described on this thread.
After all my disclaimer, my question is, does the radio works with altimetry changes?building in the path? Thanks in advance, and great work! really nice tips! and awesome name!
Hi there! From what I’ve seen at tracks like Watkins Glen they do well with large space and elevation with the setup I have. I have received communication from out spotter at all points of the track. The biggest concern with a different setup is going to be microphone quality, before the Nerdie setup my voice was largely drowned out by the exhaust sound. Any good noise-filtering mic should be okay but figuring out which is really quality is tough.
Hi, I would like to thank you for sharing all of this information.
I went ahead and bought the following:
1. x2 Baofeng UV5R (one of the car and one for the spotter)
2. x1 Nagoya antenna calibrated 462MHz UHF frequency (For spotter)
3. x1 Roof antenna calibrated 460 MHz UHF (For car)
4. NASCAR Nerdie Racing audio/mic harness (as recommended on this post)
Tests:
1. We did several communication tests between the car and the spotter (with engine off) on different places of the track. All successfully with 10/10 comm results.
2. We did the same as point 1 (with engine on) stopped inside the pit stop. 10/10 comm results.
Now the issue:
When the car is running on the track we have static noise all over the place, when the driver press the PTT button I can heard 5/10 audio quality. Same happens when the spotter wants to talk to the driver who is driving on the track.
I am supposing this could be cause of the low quality of the Baofeng radios but since the sound inside the car is pretty much comparable to the NASCAR one maybe you figured out a way to resolve this issue. It could also be the electricity generated by the engine while is running.. At this point we are not sure. thanks!
Interesting issues! I know you didn’t mention it, but I also recently heard from someone having issues with a hardwire kit. If you are, perhaps try subbing in a battery? Double and triple check anything that is grounded in the system and make sure the grounds are good.
Have you tried adjusting the frequency and seeing if that helps?
Thanks for your reply. I will doble check the grounding specially on the roof antenna inside the car. Both radios are battery operated. I also switched the radios but same issue. I tried 4 different frequencies (always UHF) between 462 and 464 MHz but unfortunately with the same results. What makes noise to me is that when the car is stopped (with engine on or off) the comm is 10/10 but the problem is when the car is running. At this point I would like to also try a Motorola or Kenwood UHF radio to see if maybe the issue is coming from the Baofeng filtering system.