It's hard to see but there's a 9-band HF/VHF/UHF antenna tied to the back of the bike. In the end I didn't use this, just used a 2/70cm dual bander, that worked well too. Then on Sunday's ride we chained Ms B's bike onto a rail and then I realised I left the keys at home - 70 miles away. That was my day on the bank holiday Monday.
When I was demonstrating Ms B how to measure and build a dipole I did't realise it'd dominate my usage! This was before we built the 20m which also made a massive impact. It also helped that we had built the dipole just as 10 openings were starting. Right now in early September 10m and 6m are slowly dying so 20 is truly dominating my ratings. It is still the 2nd most popular band here.
Well, not bad. I put an ethernet cable around the study reaching out to the radio, plonked a cheap USB sound card and the Pi, with my old USB to Serial adapter into it and voila, it works with VNC quite well, CAT and the lot. There are future experiments to be made, like using something faster than VNC but it works, apart from 6m. At 6m the cables are getting interference and the TX'ed signal is horrible. Needs more investigation. Other thing to look into is the audio cables, right now they are electrically connected. That needs to go, all of that cable stuff needs to be replaced with the audio/TTL connection kit I'm working on. That'd give me both octo-couplers for the serial side and also audio transformers on the other side. Anyway, we'll get there.