This guide outlines our recommendations for mounting and configuration to give you have the best Milo experience during skiing or snowboarding
Milo is great for all sorts of winter and snow activities. Many Milo users are professional skiing and snowboarding instructors who appreciate the ability to give immediate feedback and customized tips in the moment, instead of having to wait until their student has finished a run. Parents love using Milos while teaching their kids to ski, and kids feel braver to try things a little further from their parents. Everyone appreciates the ability to keep their group up to date on which run or lift they’re on and when they’re ready to take a break at the lodge, not to mention potential equipment failures. Cross country skiers enjoy the ability to continue a conversation at a normal speaking volume rather than having to shout or stay in absolute lock-step with their skiing partner.
Milo Clips and Mounting
For optimal audio and connection quality, it’s crucial to mount Milo near each user’s head and in a location that is as unobstructed as possible.
- If you’re wearing a backpack, use an action clip to attach Milo to one of the shoulder straps, positioning it near your upper chest or shoulder area.
- For helmet wearers, find a stable location for the action clip on the chin straps, ensuring it’s close to ear and mouth.
- The armband mount works well for some. Make sure that the Milo is positioned close to your mouth at the front of your arm, not on the back of your arm.
- In the absence of other gear, the Milo collar clip is advisable.
- Regardless of the chosen clip, always also use the lanyard for added security. If needed, you can replace the lanyard installed by default with the longer one (included with each Milo) and wear it around your neck.
- If you use only the long lanyard to wear the Milo, ensure that you pull the lanyard adjuster upwards to position the Milo close to the user’s head. Leaving the Milo low on the user can impact both audio quality and connection performance.
- Learn more about mounts here and here.
Milo Settings Configuration
Depending on your use case and how close/far away you are from each person in your Milo group and how much your distance changes, there are a couple of advanced settings you may want to adjust. You can adjust these settings using the Milo Link app or the on-device settings menu.
- Voice Activation Detection (VAD) Sensitivity — VAD sensitivity determines how loudly you need to speak for Milo to hear and transmit your voice to your group. A quiet person in a quiet environment would choose high sensitivity. When there is a lot of background noise, such as while going downhill, choose lower sensitivity – and remember to now speak up.
- Proximity Mute Distance — This setting lets you change how far or close you need to be to another Milo in your group before the Milo speaker volume is automatically lowered.
- Small Zone = A Milo in your group needs to get closer to you before your volume automatically lowers. This may be preferable when you expect to be nearby but unable to hear well, for example when skiing in line in a groomed cross country track.
- Medium Zone = The default range setting, tuned to work across the broadest set of common activities.
- Large Zone = A Milo in your group needs to get further from you before your volume automatically lowers. If the distance between riders changes often and significantly, you might prefer to stay with this larger zone.
- Push-To-Talk (PTT) Mode — If you hear a lot of noise even when others in the group are not talking, environmental noise is opening the mics, Consider using PTT mode instead of leaving the mic unmuted. In PTT mode, the Milo microphones are active only when you push-and-hold the Milo button. After you finish saying something, release the Milo button. Milo automatically mutes itself again until the next time you hold down the button to speak. This is similar to operating a standard walkie talkie. The difference is that with Milo you don’t need to wait your turn to speak. Even in PTT mode, everyone can talk anytime.
Speaker Volume not loud enough?
If your environment is very loud, you can give the speaker volume an extra boost by enabling Speaker Boost. You do this by 3 more clicks of volume up when volume is at max). This makes the volume quite a bit louder, and therefore will run down the battery charge faster, so use that boost only when necessary. Remember to be mindful of others nearby who may not want to hear your conversation.
If you find that you need to enable Speaker Boost mode often, consider using wired or wireless headphones instead of the Milo speaker. Headphones or headsets can make it easier to hear your group conversations. It also improves overall battery charge life.
You likely want to disable Proximity Mute on a Milo that uses headphones / headset.
NOTE: In version 10 and earlier, audio input is done exclusively through the Milo microphones when using a headset with an external mic, so make sure the Milo is mounted as close to your mouth as possible.