| A house is a house, of course. The shack is located in the back corner of the garage - my own cozy little corner of the world. Not the coziest, but it affords privacy (most of the time). Behind the world map are the feedlines to the attic. By punching through the garage ceiling I come in though the floor behind the kneewall of the bonus room. From there I can run the cable up to the attic along the little tray separating the insulation from the roof itself. That's a whole lot easier than fishing wires behind drywall! | |
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Let's see, in the house I use an old Yaesu FT-2700RH dual-bander, but
only the 2-m side. (I don't have a 440 antenna besides the magmount.) This
rig was known as "The Twanger" when it was used mobile, due to something
we never identified which took a moment to stabilize as soon as I keyed
up.
I've misplaced the manual to this rig, and haven't bitten the bullet
to buy another. Unfortunately, Yaesu doesn't seem to post historic
manuals on their website. Anybody know how to store memories and
set tones with this rig?
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| In the car I use a much newer Radio Shack HTX-242. No, I didn't get
it on clearance, I was about 6 months too early. It's a good 2m-only rig,
up to 45 watts. Does a great job around town.
It was tough finding a place to mount it in a Saturn. The only advice I could get was to mount it under the seat and just velcro the remote head to the dash. While that approach worked for the other Saturn owners in the club, it didn't help me, since the 242 doesn't do the remote head thing. Initially I put it on the tray of one of those jobbers built to hold a portable CD player. It's a lot heavier than the CD player, but it held OK. Eventually I realized that I could just attach the rig's bracket using the holes I'd drilled for the CD holder, which gave my rare passenger a lot more knee-room. |
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The shortwave rig is an ICOM IC-730. Hundred watts, 80 through 10 (including
12 and 17), AM, SSB, CW. It works well for me, even though it's far from
state-of-the-art. It cost me a lot less than the new stuff would've.
Yes, the mic is still attached. The only time it gets used is on the occasional Wednesday evening when I check into the RARS 10m/75m net. Other than that, I'm hunting out a CW QSO on the low end of 40 meters. (The key is way over on the left-hand side of the desk, where it belongs. It didn't make a very interesting photo.) |
The HF antenna is a loop inside the attic. It's just under 100 feet of #12 stranded wire, arranged in a 42-by-8 foot rectangle along the perimeter of the attic. It's fed with ladder line in the east corner, and the long edges point northeast/southwest. Average height is around 25 feet. It's gotten me QSOs all throughout the near half of the US. I might not be getting farther than that just due to my operating habits or due to the antenna's characteristics, I don't know. I get good signal reports, though.
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In addition to the two antennas I mentioned previously, I've built
(with help from AC4ZO,
Jeff) a copper-pipe j-pole which serves now as my field-portable antenna.
I've got enough portable mast pieces to get it most of 20 feet into the
air with guys - 12 feet or so free-standing.
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It works great in the shack -- I can daisy-chain as many devices as
I want by using a stack of banana plugs. I took it to the
MS-150
this year and drove my VHF mobile from the comfort of a table and chair,
through two full days of heavy duty public-service net.
| I discovered after my 5-year hiatus that the batteries in the little two-display LCD clock I'd bought previously (you know, the one which shows 12-hr local time and 24-hr UTC) had run out. I also discovered that those batteries aren't the easiest things to find -- or the cheapest. So I found an alternative. For about the same money, I bought a clock movement, picked up a scrap CD from the trash heap, and found a couple of miscellaneous parts, and built myself a 24-hour clock. This one runs off a single double-A, which of course is easy and cheap to replace. |  |