Mary sewed up a new seat cover for her Tour Easy, so I dismantled the seat and cleaned things up. This is a good opportunity to show how I mounted an amateur radio HT on the bike…
The general idea is simple: a water bottle holder attached to the lower seat rail with a circumferential clamp made from a chunk of half-inch aluminum plate. An aluminum spreader adapts the wider hole spacing on the bottle holder to the teeny little clamp.
With the bottle holder in place, I put the radio in a wedge seat pack, atop a block of closed-cell foam to more-or-less cushion some of the bumps. The wedge pack seatpost strap secures it to the bottom of the holder and the rail straps wind their way through the holder and lash around the aluminum spreader plate. It doesn’t move very much at all.
The radio is a long-obsolete ICOM IC-Z1A, bought specifically for this purpose: it has a remote head on the end of a coily cord. That puts the power, volume, and channel buttons out where you can actually use them.
The lump behind the seat looks moderately suspicious in this day & age: a black package with wires! The grossly oversized red-and-black pair in the foreground is the power coming from a 6-AA pack attached to the rack with a Velcro strap; it’s a jumper with Anderson PowerPoles on both ends. Coily cord to the HT head, BNC-to-UHF adapter to the mobile antenna mount, one skinny cord to the headset and the other to the PTT button on the handlear.
Other pieces of the puzzle:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
9 responses to “Tour Easy Recumbent: Amateur Radio HT Mount”
[…] Butcher the nice coily-cord cables to add Powerpole connectors that will click right into the bike radios […]
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[…] that combined GPS data (from a Byonics TinyTrak3+ encoder) with the voice audio, all mounted on our Tour Easy recumbents; the interface also supported an external battery for radio power and lived inside a machined case. […]
[…] holder attaches to the seat base rail with a machined circumferential clamp. Inside the holder, a bike seat wedge pack contains the radio with its GPS+voice interface box and provides a bit of cushioning; a chunk of […]