What KE4GHC Has Going On
This page is supposed to give you a little bit of info as to what I have going on.
I update it as I have time. I am not going to spend alot of time here. Maybe once a year
is about what I plan. If I do something cool, I will post it. Otherwise I am so busy
that I don't do much ham radio wise, other than talk. And there isn't much point discussing
that part of it. You already know all about that.
I have a modest ham shack. I don't see alot of point of discussing the staid, standard setup
that I have for a shack.
I would like to show the recent mobile setup I put in my Pontiac.
The rig is a Kenwood D-700 that has a Valor marine GPS connected to it. It is powered through a low
battery / Time Delay cutoff switch that I built.
I am fairly proud of the switch. I designed the thing using what I could scrounge component wise. I then
built my first one on perfboard to be sure my circuitry worked properly. I then found a website that would
make some circuit boards for me. It turned out to be somewhat pricey, but it works well, and looks good.
The circuit is designed to monitor the voltage of the battery and cuts off the voltage to the radio when
it drops below a certain point. I have found that 11.7 volts works best. This keeps my battery from being
run down when I forget to turn the battery off. I do that all the time. It drives me nuts.
I installed the switch into the chassis of an old el-cheapo car stereo amp. I thought it was a nice touch.
I then built a plate to hold everything and installed it in the trunk of my car, under the hat rack. It does take
up a good bit of space. I could have made everything a little tighter, but figured what the heck. I'm not going
to be putting anything back here. If I was in the Mob I'd have a bigger trunk anyways.
The biggest trick for me was to get the voltage back to the trunk without making it look all hokey. The cutoff
switch also needed an ignition signal back to it. I found an unused 50 amp fuse terminal on the Delphi fuse block.
I connected some 10 Gauge MTW wire to this terminal and ran it through the firewall, under the moulding, and into
the trunk. (MTW is Machine Tool Wire, thats the soft flexible wire that is lovely to use.)
For the Ignition signal I poked around in the cabin fuse blocks and found a fuse that was for the sunroof. I
don't have a sunroof, it only had 12VDC when the key was on, and one side of the fuse was not connected to anything.
I connected a wire to this fuse and routed it under the moulding and into the trunk.
One note here. Making the connections in the fuse block was easy, but took some doing. The biggest problem
was in finding the connectors for the Delphi fuse blocks. The Chevy dealer was unable to help me out. They could
give me the part numbers for the fuse blocks, but not the individual terminals. They all looked at me like I was
crazy. I ended up going to Delphi.com and hunted part numbers for hours on end. I finally found the part numbers and
bought the terminals from gmpartsdirect.com
Here are some pictures of the setup.
Page last fooled with on 7-7-2005 by KE4GHC