Is this you?
I paid a couple of hundred bucks for my Sena SMH10 about 12 years ago, and I am going to get my money’s worth out of it! It still works great and has a long battery life, but all my friends have upgraded to Sena Mesh Intercom and don’t want to bother with a single Bluetooth guy in a group of 15 riders with mesh intercoms. I don’t want to buy another Intercom when mine works perfectly well.
Sound familiar? Well, Sena heard you even before you complained. Sena has created the +Mesh, a mesh upgrade adapter for just about all of their legacy Bluetooth comm units. For $119 MSRP, we can all add Sena Mesh 2.0 functionality to our old Sena units.
Until recently, when my wife rode with me, she only talked with me because none of our riding friends had intercoms. Now, they all have bought the latest Sena Mesh Intercom units. She has a perfectly good SMH10 on her helmet, and the new +Mesh adapter easily and instantly brings her into the mesh conversations
The +Mesh connects with all the legacy Sena Bluetooth units by pairing. Once the Sena comm unit and the +Mesh are paired, your voice goes from your old unit, via Bluetooth, to the +Mesh device, which connects to the Sena Group Mesh world.
The default on the +Mesh is Channel 1. However, using the free Sena +Mesh app for iOS or Android, you can change open mesh channels, choosing from 1-9. The +Mesh adapter does not support the Group Mesh Intercom feature that the native mesh devices do.
The Sena +Mesh adapter comes with a 3M stick-on for mounting on a helmet, windshield, or motorcycle body part, plus a rubber strap handlebar mount. If either of the supplied mounts won’t work for your setup, it is light enough—2.1 ounces—to Velcro to an appropriate spot.
It is essential that the incorporated antenna is in the open, where your own body or a motorcycle hard part won’t block the signal. If you are riding solo, you will find all your comm unit functions act normally—play music, phone calls—all the while being able to communicate seamlessly with your mesh group.
However, if you intercom with a pillion rider, as I do, your partner will lose the ability to hear the music from your smartphone over the Bluetooth intercom. So, the passenger will have to connect to another music source. In that case, you will still be able to communicate on an open Sena Mesh Intercom channel 1-9.
A distance test with the Sena 50C and the SMH10 transmitting through the +Mesh resulted in about a quarter-mile range in a residential environment. Had there been other Sena Mesh 2.0 units in my group, they would have remoted off each other, extending the range considerably.
The Sena +Mesh adapter will yield a talk time of about 13 hours, takes about two hours to charge fully, and will operate while charging. The +Mesh adapter extends the useful life of your “old” Sena Bluetooth unit. The +Mesh adapter is a welcome update/upgrade to keep your perfectly good, but technologically obsoleted, Sena unit from ending up in your electronics junk box.
