HamSet

The HamSet Project

Have you ever spent far too much money on headsets, only to end up with sore ears after a few hours of contesting?

Have you ever found yourself surrounded by adapters, splitters and mysterious little cables just because you wanted to use a decent microphone with the headphones you actually liked?

And have you ever tried to copy a weak DX signal while the operator sitting next to you was shouting into a pile-up as if his life depended on it?

Well… that is pretty much where HamSet started.

Back in 2017, after one too many long contests with aching ears, I decided there had to be a better solution. The turning point came thanks to my friend and right-hand man Stefano, IK2QEI. He was already using the Bose® QC25 for CW, and that is how I discovered them.

Light, extremely comfortable and with an Active Noise Cancelling system that actually works, they immediately looked like the perfect starting point.
There was only one thing missing: a proper microphone for ham radio.

So I started experimenting.

The idea was simple: keep everything that made the QC25 so good, add a real boom microphone and make the whole thing work through one clean cable. No cable spaghetti, no strange adapters hanging from the desk, no unnecessary complications.

The first one was built for my own station. Then some friends at II2S and CN3A tried it, liked it and started asking for their own.
And that is when my little personal solution slowly became HamSet.

Today the idea is still exactly the same: comfort, isolation, reliable audio and a microphone system designed for real radio operation.
Because during a contest you already have enough things to think about and your headset should not be one of them.

Not just a headset. A contest tool.

Alessandro, IU2IBU