Travel Time appoaching

I'm hitting the road on Monday, Labor Day in the USA. I'm putting some 4000 to 4500 miles on whatever I drive. I observed with the new pickup that I have space under the back seat to put in a potentially useful rack for my ham and cb radios. I'm not convinced that the CB radio situation is what I'm looking for, so I may be picking up a new CB later today. It can be simple as the only "control" I'm going to have at the driving position is going to be the microphone. I do see that Cobra has something that might work though, where all the controls are all on the mic.

As it stands (I'm still building it out) I'm going to have at least 3 radios that should be functional. A CB, a dual band Icom ID-800, and a single band Yaesu FT-1802. None of the radios are "new", though the D in ID for the ID-800 does stand for Digital, as it supports DStar, though I don't expect to be working any of those repeaters.

The FT-1802 is my radio for APRS, It uses a TinyTracker3 as the APRS TNC, and I've mostly had good luck with it. Last couple of years it's been offline, mostly because where it was mounted in the old truck wasn't very conducive to accessing it, and it somehow got off frequency. That's not a good state to be in. One of the things I expect the new setup to correct.

I'll be sharing the rack concept if it appears to work out well. No two of these radios "mounts" in the same way. I've debated re-designing one of the mounts for the rack to support the fact that the CB radio microphone plugs into the side of the radio, which makes the design of my rack for it a bit difficult. A different radio is in the works. Looks like it has a modular connector for the microphone (RJ48 variety)so I can extend that to the front seat.

If everything works out, I'll be posting the models in both 3mf and step. One reason fro the latter is that I understand some folks prefer them for remixing, and this may be a good set of models to do that with. Add improvements like venting, making taller racks, or even interlinking vertically.

So for the next couple of weeks I'll be on the road, pretending to have a good time, or something like that. Hoping all the best for everyone.