AB4UG Radioblog

The former guest room/storage room has been painted, and stuff has been moved in and the radio connected to the antenna. Got the new shack up and running last week just in time for the 4th Annual Worked All Twitter and it’s working out pretty well. The shack also doubles as Connie’s office space, which gives her plenty of room to work.

For some reason, we ended up losing 15m with the shack move, probably from using a shorter length of coax to go from the radio to the antenna. Still have all the other bands though from 40m up to parts of 6m.

A 6 foot table provides a decent amount of room for the radio, monitor and working space. Need to craft some kind of stand to hold the radio head and hand mic. A little MFJ-108B clock provides local and UTC time. We used painters tape to attach the band plan chart temporarily until we decide on a more permanent place for it.

The radio is tucked away underneath a stackable cube thing (nicely covered by the ARRL centennial bandanna thing).

About half of the collection of wall paper is up on the wall with several more waiting for me to put them up.

Next to the table is the shelf of ham radio books for easy reference. Now I have a whole empty shelf in my office bookshelf that I can fill.

Connie also found this awesome mobile antenna holder (commonly marketed as a “pool cue rack”…wider appeal I guess) that was added to the shack yesterday.

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

To address the need for a stand for the radio’s control head, I headed off to the workbench and dug up some scrap pieces of MDF (it was actually part of the packaging for a treadmill we bought a while back). Fired up the table saw to cut it to an appropriate size and glued/screwed the pieces together.

It’s a simple L-shaped base with the top part where the control head mounts to at a bit of an angle (30° according to my table saw)

4 screws provide the attachment point for the mounting plate from a goose neck stand. It was already on the radio and made sense to make use of it for this table stand. Here it is with the control head mounted.

A little bit of spray glue and some rubber kitchen liner on the bottom finishes off the stand. Not the prettiest thing, but it works.

Putting together the new shack has given me a few project ideas to work on:

• Large dual display clock
• Radio head stand
• Window pass-through for coax and wires

I have a couple ideas in mind for the clock, including something powered by one of my *duinos, and something widget-y that can run on my tablet. Needless to say, neither one will be coming quickly since I have a lot to learn about doing both.

The control head for the radio doesn’t really sit all that well by itself on the table. There’s supposed to be a “foot” for it, but it’s lost in a box somewhere. I’ve got a few ideas to craft one out of some scrap pieces of wood lying around the garage. Shouldn’t be too hard to put something together that will work in the shack. Might not be pretty, but it should do the job.

The coax feed out the window to the antenna is a little less than optimal. The coax is sandwiched between a couple pieces of foam pipe insulation, which works but doesn’t look that pretty. There are window feed through units like the MFJ-4601 that would look nice. I was thinking it would be a fun project to make my own version.

Off to the workbench!

We’re getting ready to move the shack out of the office/shack into what used to be the guest bedroom. It will still be the guest bedroom for the rare occasion we actually have people stay over, but it will become mostly the shack.

It should be a much better room for playing radio, especially from a temperature standpoint. The office tends to get pretty warm in the summer and especially so when the computer/heater is running as well.

The room is also a lot closer to the antenna and I’ll be able to have a much shorter coax run out to the antenna than I do now. The room is all prepped for painting, and we’ve selected what we think is a nice shade of blue for the room. A day to paint with primer and let it dry, another day for the paint and we should be ready to move the shack into the room.

Right now the plan is to have a long table with the radios against the inside wall.

The antenna feed point is just outside the windows, so I’ll bring the coax through one of these windows and run it along the walls to the radio.

This should also make it easier to use the back yard for antenna projects since it will make the feed line runs shorter and easier.