If you are like me, you like to stay connected wile out about town. This isn't much of a problem if your transportation is grounded at all four corners. It poses a bit more of a challenge if your preference leans toward the more exelorating two wheel forms. Add to this the need to do it on a tight budget and you have an interesting adventure ahead of you.
This past summer I was restoring an old Honda 750 back to a serviceable condition. Wile I worked, I thought about the ways to satisfy my communications itch. This is where the budget became a problem. Rebuilding the carburetors turned out to be four times as expensive as expected, brakes, cables, battery and the big-ticket item tires, which had dry rot cracks you could wedge a dime into. These things consumed my allotted budget for this project and didn't leave me with the funds to invest in radio equipment. The rest of the work consisted of steel wool, polish and a couple months of elbow grease.
Having only two radios to work with, a 2-meter mobile and a duel band HT was a tad bit limiting. Not wanting to remove the mobile from my truck left me with only one option, a HT which is a less than ideal situation. Another problem I encountered was that of an antenna. Now it's not something that most people think of, but motorcycles have a conspicuous lack of ground plane. There for I had to find an antenna that carries its own ground plane or that doesn't require one. The idea of mounting an antenna with ground radials on it didn't appeal much to me. Nor did the idea of hanging a counter poise hanging off the back of the bike. I opted to make a twin lead J-pole incased in �" PVC pipe to keep it upright. This solution wasn't without its share of problems. The PVC pipe alters the tuning of the antenna so it had to be tuned in the pipe. Also, the height when mounted on the bike was about 6" taller than the than the height of the garage door, so it was necessary to make it fold over. Good thing I caught that one before I tried to ride out of the garage.
Now, onto a very important aspect epically for motorcycle operation. Controls need to be positioned so that they can be accessed easily and with out interfering with normal operation of the bike. The ideal situation would be to have the headset built into the helmet with a non locking type connector to the rest of the gear on the bike, and to put the PTT switch on the handle bars where it can be reached as easily as the horn and turn signals. With the preferred setup out of the way, I had to settle for a few compromises. The first thing I tried was to use a headset that I had on hand that I wasn't using, but this proved unsatisfactory. The audio level was far too low to be heard clearly over the noise from the bike and the wind. To get louder audio I turned to a set of headphones from a personal stereo, cut off the band and fit them into pockets trimmed out of the foam in the helmet. This left me without a usable mic or a remote PTT switch. In order to get things working for the time being I used a speaker mic clipped to a strap around my neck, that way if I had to drop the mic it would drop to its home position. Then I just plugged the headphones into the speaker mic, clip the HT to the fairing, attach the DC power cord and the antenna and I'm ready to ride. This setup works just fine for monitoring but is somewhat difficult for transmitting. When driving on city streets, it's hard to find time between stops and starts to take one hand off the grips and shove the mic up behind the chin guard on my helmet. Also when on the highway and have time to talk, the engine and wind noise made communication difficult but not imposable. It would probably have helped to mod the mic by adding a layer or two of coffee filter over the mic element to act as a windsock. This is also a good fix for an overly hot mic.
Well that's about as far as I took things for this past riding season, but its now February, and we are only a couple of months till next season. Its time to start thinking about improvements I would like to make before I pull it back out in the spring. I've enjoyed the challenge of doing this for cheap and I think I'll continue to develop my setup this way in the future.