Time to include communications at each driver station?

[RomeroFRC5012]

Originally Posted by EricH

That's kind of an interesting idea. If I was to make a suggestion...

Have it coaches-only, at least at first--the 3 coaches on the alliance all get a headset and talk to each other, with the option of keeping drivers' instruction "off-mike". But also give the refs (head ref or appropriate substitute) a mike-only interface, so that they can call a foul in straight to the coaches as the foul is dished out. Something like "Hey, Red, back off or get a pinning foul in 3... 2... 1... Tech foul!"

I am a driver so i know the struggles of giving or receiving information from the couches so this will not only help for that but it will help because at the end of every match we will know what fouls or whatnot were put upon us so there's no guessing who won

[Canon reeves]

I would prefer a headset with my team only. It would be better for the coach to be able to communicate with the human player than with the other coaches. Since the coaches are all there beside each other, they can communicate easier already than the human player, at least in Arial Assist. As a driver, I understand how common it is for the driver just to block out background noise, and a headset with the only voice I need to listen to at the moment would be nice.

[GeeTwo]

First, a disclosure: I've never been "behind the glass." Our head coach did this for the first few matches our rookie year, and since then it's been all students.

If anything is done here, it should certainly be well-regulated and the channels standardized; a wild-west situation would introduce more problems (and OBTW even greater asymmetry to well-funded teams) than it would solve.
Having a coach be able to speak to his drivers over a dedicated channel would probably be good but apparently unnecessary in most cases. A more reasonable use of this capability would be to have the alliance lead (team #1 for ranking rounds, lead team for playoffs) be an "alliance captain" who would have a dedicated channel to his team captains and human players. This could either mean that the lead team gets an extra human, or that there are only two regular HP, and the lead team's HP would become the team coach in this case.
Spotters off-field sounds particularly problematic, and should be limited to a VERY small number per team (zero or one), and those should only be speaking to a coach, not a driver or HP, and certainly not the drivers or HP of other teams.