Ham Shack Saga:
I have always been interested in electronics and more so in radio. Early on, as a curious 10 year old, I would find old table radios in dumpsters or bug people for their no longer wanted radios, working or not, and tear them apart and attempt to fix them (whether or not they needed it).
I had a wooden speaker cabinet that made a perfect mounting platform for a naked table radio chassis. Guess I was lucky that I didn't electrocute myself but, boy oh boy, was that ever impressive looking with all those glowing vacuum tubes exposed to the public.
One of the neighborhood kids had a somewhat dead superhet CB walkie talkie that he gave me. I got it working again and that gave me the radio bug big time. How cool was it to be able to send a 100 milliwatt signal several blocks and have a conversation with someone?
Fiddling around with various shortwave radios gave me the incentive to get a license in 1968. Many trips to CW electronics in Denver were required in order to check out all the nifty new and used ham gear.
After a while I managed to scrape together enough money to buy a used Johnson Viking Valiant, Hallicrafters R-274/FRR military rcvr and a 14AVQ vertical antenna. Quite the station for a lowly novice. I couldn't fathom ever having a really cool looking Drake TR4.
A couple of years later I got interested in 2M FM and the like and upgraded to Technician level.
Around 1975 graduated to Advanced privileges and an FT-101EE. Quite active for a number of years until other interests such as kids and family activities seemed to eliminate my play time.
I had been out of ham radio activity for about the last 15 years. After working where I do, RF reliability engineering for Adwanced Energy here in Ft, Fun, I got the bug again.
I bought a pre-made ham antenna (6BVT) from DX Engineering. This type of antenna needs a large number of grounding radials installed at the base and radiating out in an even fashion. The Installation instructions from DX Engineering say that one doesn't need to bury the ground counterpoise radials… just lay them on the lawn they will get pulled to the ground level by the grass when it starts to green up in the spring. Not having a lawn to hide my radial wires and even more so, not wanting the local Bambi tripping over them I was faced with trenching in. I wasn't about to dig several hundred feet of ½ inch wide trench by hand.
A not so quick trip to town and to Homeless Depot, picked up a gas powered lawn edger to make trenches to bury the radial wires in. About 1 hour after starting to inlay the trenches the V belt broke on the edger and I had to go to town AGAIN, to get a couple more belts. New toy and it breaks!
Darned Chinese V belts.
While the instructions for the ground radials seem to be a bit confusing as to whether on not one really needs to used tuned lengths or just lay out a lot of long wires in a radial fashion I went ahead used tuned lengths figuring that about mid July on, the soil won't have any moisture and “ground” will be many feet below the antenna. As it is right now, the radiation take off angle is fairly high and I may opt for an additional set of long radials to try and lower it a bit.
Then there is tuning up the antenna on the ham bands…. I had to retune the band switching traps because the ground radial system was sufficiently efficient that the antenna wouldn't tune by adjusting the pole lengths.
The main coax feed line is trenched in and inside 1 inch PVC water pipe. I figured the bunnies didn't need an RG8 snack.
I have read and heard some hams go on about how they think factory built antennas are a 'cop-out' and they only use home brew. To me, it's amazing just how much work it took to install and tune up a factory built antenna. Installing the antenna properly took about 3 days.
The XYL thinks this looks Phallic… whatever.... Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Don't think I'll be bothering the neighbors too much.
The HAM shack:
This 10 by 12 foot mini barn has undergone several adaptations. This is a pix of when we first moved up to the house site and were using this as our bedroom and utility closet. The solar PV panels are getting installed for our first pass living off the grid. The travel trailer was the potty and kitchen facilities. The space between the cabin door and the trailer door is truly a breeze-way!
Eventually we got the house built and the mini barn turned into a storage shed for a while. Then it got a new roof and a dog door and fencing to make it a super deluxe dog house.
Remodeling and painting the “dog house”, soon to be the ham shack was time consuming . There is carpeting in the shack and I had to work around already loaded gear and lay down tarps so paint wouldn't slop over and mess up the rug. Then installing a shelving system with carpeting and under shelf lighting. Installing a heater and coax runs.
A look at the mini barn of today: (complete with phallic symbol in the background.)
My brother suggested that since this was like Pee-Wee's play house that I get a funky door…. I'm thinking a big-overstuffed chair that talks…
The Modified sat dish between the ham shack and the barn is for WIFI signals or hooking up the Sirius sat radio for terrestrial signals from Denver.
The pottery KILN shed is directly behind ham shack and the P-shed is next to it. The P-shed was our temporary storage area for the solar power stuff while we built the house. In this case "P" stands for power.
It's just way cool how all this stuff works together…
The computer program, Ham Radio Deluxe, which was freeware (I sent in a donation to HRD anyhow since it is so darned cool) not only controls the functions of the FT-950 but it also has digital decoding modes that use the sound card in the computer to decode various forms of RTTY (Teletype) and Morse code!
Now, how cool is that, I ask you?
Sitting between the rig stack and the laptop is an ancient "Vibroplex" Mores code key.
I have been experimenting with several “vintage” microphones. Actually the D104 sounds about the best to me on the FT-950 and FT-ONE. The next step is to get one of my cheepo but otherwise good sounding studio condenser mics and try that out. The room acoustics are not too good and the mics all need to be close talked so that makes them a bit bassy due to the proximity effect.
It's even better with the lights off! 'Sept I can't see the labels on the radio buttons.
I have several late edition FT-101s that are in various states of repair and disrepair. I bought them as project rigs. So far one FT101-E is up and running. When restoring old rigs it seems that between being some combination of smokey, greasy and/or moldy smelling means it's time for a bath with dish soap and ammonia after a full disassembly.
Like a wise person said, "if it wasn't for work I'd still have too much to do!"
