In this post
Most of what breaks a trail day is not the hard obstacle. It is losing the car behind you.
Why radios
I wheel with a small group, and once we leave the pavement there is usually no cell signal at all. The trails here run up into the mountains and forests, and phones drop to nothing within a few kilometres. So we run handheld radios, one Baofeng per car, on a shared channel.
They earn their place constantly. The lead car calls a washed-out section before anyone else drops into it. When a line needs a spotter, you talk the driver through it instead of hanging out the window shouting over an engine. If the group splits at a junction, nobody sits at the wrong fork for twenty minutes. It is the difference between a convoy and four cars that happen to be in the same forest.
The problem was where to put the thing. Loose in a cupholder it launches across the cabin on the first real bump. Clipped to a seatbelt it is behind me and out of reach. I wanted it up front, within a hand’s reach of the wheel, and I wanted to grab it and drop it back without looking.
The panel it mounts to
I already have a MOLLE panel across the roof at the front of the cabin. It sits horizontally overhead, so gear hangs below it and I reach up at it from underneath. The winch remote lives up there, and now the radio does too.
The panel is 2.2 mm sheet with the standard slot grid, 33 by 28 mm per slot. That grid is the whole point: anything I design bolts straight to it with no new holes in the car, and I can move it around later.
The mount, in two printed parts
The radio has a factory belt clip on its back. Rather than clamp the body, I made a clip that the radio’s own belt clip slides onto, so the radio lies flat along the roof with the antenna pointing rearward and out of the way.
Holding it to the panel is a single M6 bolt. The trick with an overhead panel is that a normal bolt-and-nut wants three hands: one on the bolt below, one on the nut above, and one you do not have while lying under the roof. So the nut lives in a printed backer plate that sits on top of the panel and captures it. I reach the bolt from underneath, and the plate above stops the nut spinning.
The plate is sized so its ends bridge two slots and its body sits flat on the panel, which stops it rotating when I tighten from below.
Getting it on and off
The clip itself is the part I fussed over. Too loose and the radio walks out on corrugations. Too tight and I am fighting it one-handed at a junction. I printed it a few times and adjusted the rail until the belt clip slides in with a firm push and stays put through everything the trail throws at it.
It has held through a full muddy day of wheeling without shifting, and the radio comes off in one motion when I want it.
The model
I designed it around my own radio and panel, printed it on my Bambu, and branded it JABA.GE like the rest of my mounts. If you run a Baofeng UV-5G Mini on a MOLLE panel, the model is free to download and print:
Baofeng UV-5G Mini Radio Holder for MOLLE Panel on MakerWorld.
It is one of a small family of mounts I am building for that panel. More are coming as I print them.
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