The Formal Shack, as its name implies, is in the formal living room.
When we built our new home the floor plans called for your typical downstairs rooms: Kitchen, Family Room, Living Room and Dinning Room.
We really do not have any use for a Formal Living Room so why not a Formal Shack?
We also realized that most of our friends are Hams so having a radio not far from the kitchen was a good idea.
Entertaining Hams at dinner I have found that many love to try out the little rig, and many have helped run GTN from this room.
Now I must mention you are entering the era that I call “SPY RADIO”. Imagine that the year is 1939. Yes, I have to operate STEALTH.
Due to CCR”S (Covenant Codes & Restrictions) I am not allowed to have an outside antenna.
Yes, it may seem unfair and the neighbors can have satellite dishes and so on. Let’s look at the positive side! We are operating a secret Amateur Radio Station and I am going to tell you how it can be done.
Think back to WWII around 1939. Below is an excerpt about station “X”.
http://www.thg.org.uk/stationx/
“At a hidden location 50 miles outside London, Britain's best-kept secret played a major part in winning World War II.
At Bletchley Park, some 10,000 people worked around the clock, but nobody knew of their existence.
Bletchley Park, known as Station X, was the largest code-breaking establishment the world had ever seen,
where in hastily constructed huts brilliant minds worked to crack German codes.
The full story would not emerge for at least 30 years after the war had ended…..
In the history of warfare, never before had one site known so many of the enemy's secrets.
The people who worked at Bletchley Park came from all walks of life; anthropologists, paleontologists, mathematicians and crossword fanatics.
Here, many of them talk for the first time about Station X.”
So see, operating in secret can be fun and a challenge and no one will ever suspect what you are doing.
The station in this shack is the Kenwood TS-570S with an Astron Power Supply.
The Lighted Key Case to the right has a nice collection of keys and paddles.
This station currently uses the Vibroplex Code Warrior and the small Vibroplex Code Mite Straight Key.
The Kenwood can run QRP and QRO to 100 watts. The box on the floor I found at Hobby Lobby, which is a craft store that the XYL likes for her projects.
I mounted an antenna switch on the back and store a battery in the box as a back up to the station in the case of power loss.
From the photos you can’t see the coax and where it runs to the antenna.
The coax (RG8X) runs along the floor next to the wall and behind the bookcase. I have two coaxes running to the bookcase.
Actually, there are more but they are not used yet! Behind the bookcase is a hole in the wall with a receptacle just like a wall outlet.
Hidden in the wall are two PVC pipes that run to the attic. So now you know how I run my coax to my antennas in the attic.
I have several antennas in my attic. Currently, there are 5 antennas up there.
The Kenwood TS570S has an internal antenna tuner and so I use two antennas with this rig and can tune all bands except 160.
Antenna One is a Carolina Windom 80 Shorty. This is basically an off center fed dipole.
For more info on this antenna please visit http://www.radioworks.com/ as that is where I got mine.
My other antenna is a homebrew 80-meter dipole.
For this antenna, I used rather thin wire 20 AWG that I purchased from
http://www.action-electronics.com/.
I cut the antenna for the middle of the 80-meter band using the basic formula for a half wave dipole.
(468 divided by the Frequency in MHz) I just measured about 4 feet from the edge of my
test bench and placed a piece of masking tape there and proceeded to make the antenna.
The antenna works well, even if you use 100 watts, which I use to run GTN (The Georgia CW Training Net).
So now you know my secret about my stealth radio operations.
For more fun read books about station “X” and the Enigma Machine. Keep up the good work with your code breaking!
Bibliography
Except taken from “Station X -
The Story of Bletchley Park”.
See this website for more info:http://www.thg.org.uk/stationx/
