HF Bicycle Mobile Beginnings

It all started around 20 years ago.

I already enjoyed regularly riding my bike on the promenade at Blackpool, which is very close to my home QTH.

I knew that the sea water was an ideal ground-plane from my days working HF car mobile in the 1970’s with my rear tyres in the saltwater giving me good performance, so as an experiment, I put an old Yaesu FT- 817 on my bike, using a very short home-made centre loaded vertical for 14MHz, with just 2.5 Watts, contacts were made into USA, Australia and New Zealand on SSB from the bike whilst riding along near to the sea, even running QRP the performance when riding close to the sea was outstanding.

“I was now truly hooked on operating HF bike mobile close to the sea”.

What I needed to do now was to improve the system to get better results!

So with new found enthusiasm the bike steadily developed over the years into a much more efficient full blown radio station on two wheels, with power output of up to 250 Watts when I pull the trailer along behind my bike.

The original bike was fitted with home-made mono-band antenna’s for different HF bands, multiple 12V gel batteries, and a tuned “on-board” ground-plane, also computer logging, weather monitoring and digital voice recording.