If you’ve got a headset or if you contest, you’ve almost certainly got a foot switch for your wireless, and the chances are that it looks something like this.
I bought this years ago from Maplin for under a fiver and it’s been used as part of my station here, originally with my Heil headset, then with my RadioSport, with various radios. It’s been to Herm, it’s been to Ross Revenge, it’s been everywhere I’ve taken my headset.
But it’s rubbish!
These footswitches are sold all over the place for various different purposes. Even Heil sell a rebranded version of something very similar for about forty quid but they’re all just a bit crap. They’re light, they move around and they need a certain amount of pressure at one end only. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stamped on it but caught it wrong, or missed, and it’s just not worked.
Every time I use it, I hate it and I put it away, determined to do something about it, but I always forget until the next time I open the box and it’s there, smirking at me.
A few days ago, inspired by a conversation about an old job, my mind was drawn back to this. I used to do some work at BBC Radio premises in London and one place was a typing pool, where they transcribed programme recordings from tape using a transcription machine. I remembered they all controlled these machines by foot pedals and they ran these for hours a day. Something like that pedal would be ideal.
I had a search through eBay and bought a Philips LFH 0210/90B dictaphone transcription foot pedal for about twenty quid. It comes with a three pin 3.5mm jack plug so I figured there was some logic inside for the three pedals. This is what I got.
Taking it apart was easy, there are two screws on the bottom and then a couple of clips that just need a gentle nudge with a screwdriver. With the top off, it looks like this.
I was right, there’s a little logic board in the top right corner. There are two lines in from the cable plus the screen. The screen goes to all three microswitches, the red and white wires go to the board and from the board, there are red, green and white wires out to each switch.
I desoldered all the wires, cut the red from the cable back as I’m not going to use that and then linked the others all together, that’s the white from the cable and the green, red and white wires to the microswitches.
What this does is wires all three switches in parallel so that any of them can be used to put the radio into transmit.
With the joints all made, I tested at the far end of the cable and it was all working as expected so I added some heat shrink to the joint, tidied it up as per below and put it back together.
With that done, I just cut the three connection 3.5mm plug from the cable and replaced it with a mono quarter inch jack plug for the radio end with the screen on the body and the white going to the tip.
Job done, I now have a much more stable and useful foot switch for the radio.
