"Affront to God" Radio and Equipment Upfitters

Installing Radios in Vehicles they were Never Meant to Be In!

Specializing in Non-Intrusive, Non-Destructive Mounting Solutions

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Customers

This install was completed recently on a customers 2014 Subaru Outback! The customer requested an Anytone AT-778 mobile and a dual-band external antenna to be installed without any permanent modifications. Check out the results!

Our Story

ATG Upfitters had its humble beginnings in 2020 during Covid. Our founder was introduced to the wonderful world of Ham Radio during his quarantine. He started out buying Baofeng UV-5R radios for airsoft comms and learned all about what they can do. He studied and tested for his license at his alma matre, Rochester Institute of Technology, and joined their Amateur Radio club - K2GXT. During his time there, he was gifted his first mobile radio - a QYT KT-8900D. With this mobile came a question: How am I going to mount this? At the time, he owned a 2004 BMW 325XI - a car with very little storage space. So he made do with what he had. He removed the sunglass holder in the dashboard, disassembled the transmission tunnel, and snaked his power and antenna cords down into the trunk to a Nagoya antenna magmounted to a cookie sheet. The name of the game was preservation - how can we maximize the potential of this vehicle without making any permanent modifications? The setup worked - albeit a little noisy, but it accomplished everything he wanted it to.

Shortly after that, he graduated to a much more suitable radio - an Anytone AT-778 mobile. With this radio came some unique challenges. It was much larger than the QYT mobile, and would never fit in the same spot. He got creative. Teaching himself 3D modeling, he designed a pair of incredibly simplistic brackets. These brackets looked like an inverse C. They were long enough to fit a standard double-sided Command strip and just thick enough that the mounting bracket of the Anytone could slide inside. This mount was affixed to the dashboard of the BMW and remained there for several months. The power and antenna cables were not routed anywhere as neatly, sliding down the dashboard and the console before entering the transmission tunnel. However, it worked. It remained in service until being replaced months later.

In the years that followed, multiple radios and mounting solutions were attempted - but none of them lasted more than a few months before being swapped to a new rig. These mobiles included the following:

A QYT KT-WP12 Dual-Band Remote-Mount
A Retrevis RT73 Dual-Band DMR
A Baofeng UV-5R with a battery eliminator and a magmount antenna
A Yaesu VX-5R with a battery eliminator

Before finally settling on the only radio solution to make it more than a year: An ICOM IC-2730A Dual-Band Remote Head. This rig brought its own unique set of challenges and solutions, some that are still used to this day. Firstly, the suction cup mount would not stay on the windshield. Many different solutions were tried for this, before ultimately coming to rest on a 3M suction cup plate mounted to the dashboard.

Then came the issue of audio. While the IC-2730A is a fantastic mobile radio and natively supports remote head mounting, it has one massive shortcoming. The only audio source lives in the control brick. This means that you have two options: Mount the brick somewhere local and turn the volume up very high, or run a dedicated speaker from the brick to wherever you use the head. Initially, he "mounted" the mobile inside the glove box. Power was readily available and it was close enough that it could be heard at higher volumes, but the sound was muffled and difficult to understand over the road noise, and completely overpowered if there was anything else happening in the vehicle. However, on a visit to a local electronics shop that was closing its doors, he found the perfect solution - A pair of 3.5mm speakers with a very long audio cable and adhesive mounts that would stretch from the mount point to the passenger compartment. He struggled with deciding on a mount point for these speakers at first - after all, the point was non-permanent mounting. Finally, he had an epiphany - Why do they need to be mounted to the car?

This was perfect. He bundled together the head cable and both speaker wires with zip ties and ran them to the control box in the trunk. This mount stayed for over a year - until he sold the car.

In 2023, he graduated from RIT. His gift to himself? A new car to replace the 300k mile BMW. He decided on a dark blue 2016 Audi A6 Quattro. He stuck with portable radios for a while, not really knowing how to mount this radio in the car. There was just too much technology in the way - the dashboard was too cluttered to fit it. Upon a visit to his parents house, he discovered the solution. His father was retiring some older tablet mounts from his businesses delivery vans. These mounts were perfect. They connected to the seat rails and were fully adjustable, perfect for a non-intrusive mounting solution. He quickly commandeered one of these mounts and began working on the integration. These mounts required some modifications to the original mounting bracket that the ICOM included. After the changes, though, it became clear that this would be the end-all for non-invasive mobile mounting. He discovered that he could utilize the footwell channels running the length of the car so the cables could be hidden.

The one problem left to solve was the microphone. Fortunately, the ICOM uses a mic that connects over a standard RJ-45 port. He found a 90-degree adapter online, built his own RJ-45 cable, and snaked the microphone underneath the trim on the center console to the seat rail on the drivers side, where it came back up and connected to the microphone cable. The microphone itself was outfitted with a swiveling magnet that attached to a receiver on the console, affixed with only double-stick tape. This solution worked perfectly, and remained for many months.

With his involvement in K2GXT, he was approached to assist another local club with an event as a SAG (Support and Gear) / Sweep driver. This role would require driving around all day, listening and talking on the radio. Some of the drivers also put together a car-to-car simplex channel, which would necessitate the use of MDC capable radios. Not wanting to part with the ICOM just yet, he decided to fit a Motorola CDM-1250 to the car in addition, so both radios could be used simultaneously. Unfortunately, the mount for the remote head of the CDM was not compatible with the head, rather was made for the brick. This was not discovered until after a custom mounting bracket was fabricated to fuse the two displays together.

With limited time remaining before the event, and no head mounts readily available online, he had to figure something out quick. After visiting Home Depot to survey his options, he left with a rail of aluminum flat-stock and a package of decorative L-Brackets for building shelves. With the aluminum, he built a riser for the mount, allowing it to sit above the ICOM's speakers. The L-brackets needed to be shaved down to accommodate for the clearance on the CDM head mounts. He also added a spot to mount the microphone for the CDM, since both radios would need to be operational. After it was all said and done, he had a working dual-radio mount for the event the next day. It wasn't pretty, but it was functional.

After the event, he discovered how useful the CDM radios were. They could understand public safety frequencies much better than the ICOM, they had MDC, and their transmit audio and power was much higher than any HAM radio could be. So, after purchasing the proper remote head mounts for the CDM, he retired the ICOM completely. With two CDMs, though, a new mounting solution had to be fabricated. So using the newly acquired head mounts and the flat-stock, he created a dual CDM mount that was compatible with the tablet arm. Eventually the VHF CDMs microphone was removed, and the UHF CDM was given a microphone extension to the drivers side, much like the ICOM.

Eventually, after getting into EMS and more of the county moving over to trunked radio systems, he decided it was time for him to catch up with the times. His most recent personal project was to install a Harris XG-100M into the Audi. The brick was installed inside the spare tire compartment, and the head (A CH-721) used the same tablet mount that had held the CDMs. The cables were bundled and ran down the same channels as had been used previously, and the speaker mounted to the arm.

That control head didn't last for long, though, after he discovered that Harris manufactured a handheld control unit for the radio, the HHC-731. With this controller installed and the speaker relocated to be out of the way, the build-out on the Audi was completed... for now.