--By Ed DD5LP

When I saw the Radioddity coffee cup mount (RH1) – I thought, what a great idea – a way to hold a radio steady in a car without having to drill holes in your car to attach a mount. The base of this mount sits in the hole where you would otherwide put your take-out paper coffee cup while driving. Once in the hole a twist expands the bottom of the base to fit tightly in the coffee cup hole and then there is a rotatable and tiltable double arm which ends with a standard camera mount type screw.

Radioddity includes a ball adapter piece to fit on the top of the arm which in turn fits to the mini-mobile (amateur and PMR) radios that Radioddity sell (the website says which models). In addition to this they also provide an adapter that the belt clip on an HT can fit into.

All of this is very good and it is clear the unit is designed for small, light 2m/70cm mobile or HT radios – what about the "little baby" HF rig, the Xiegu G106?

The first issue is that the G106 is not supplied with a mobile mount at all but looking around on TEMU, I found the generic radio mount shown below.

This was really cheap and so "worth a go" – I ordered it and received it in under a week at the same time, the Radioddity coffee cup mount also arrived. I was expecting to have to drill the generic mount and fit some kind of nut that the camera style bolt on the top of the mount would screw into.

Upon looking at the HT adapter piece supplied by Radioddity, it was clear that it had the mounting nut I needed moulded into one half of the adapter and the adapter was held together with two short screws. Removing these I could see that I could use half of this HT belt-clip adapter as the "nut" that I needed to add to the bottom of the generic mount. As luck would have it, I could screw the adapter half into the existing slots on the bottom of the generic mount with that set to the needed width for the G106.

Now we come to the next issue. The G106 was never designed for mobile mounting however the 4 case mount screws on the side of the radio, were well places to take the "rollers" that came with the generic mount and by replacing the screws with longer ones (but not too long, I didn't want to damage anything inside the G106), which I found in my junk box, the rollers were fitted and I could slide the G106 into and out of the generic mount.

The generic mount screwed nicely onto the top of the cup holder mount as sat solidly there (I did not use the ball mount).

The next test was to use this in my car. Unfortunately with my Peugeot 2008 the cup holders are down under the dash where an ashtray would have been in older cars, so this is not as good as when the coffee cup holes are clear of obstructions in the open. Indeed for holding a hot cup of coffee this placement is less than ideal – hopefully your car has the place you put a hot coffee cup in, in a better location! In any case it was possible to mount an operate the radio here as you can see from the pictures below.

As always YMMV depending upon your car and if you can get the same generic radio mount that I did. The coffee cup holder mount remains a great (and economic) idea for supporting light radios (don’t try this with a G90 or X6100!).

-- 73 all Ed DD5LP

Picture showing radio on rollers in the generic mount on top of the coffee cup mount.

The complete structure

Close up of mount

Close-up of side rollers on G106

Mounted in car

Mount and radio separated