Episodios

  • Building a shack: Part 8 - Will it ever end?

    Building a shack: Part 8 - Will it ever end?
    Jan 31 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio

    Building a shack makes a number of assumptions about your situation and to make it abundantly clear, it's not the only way to enjoy the hobby of amateur radio. Visiting clubs locally and remotely, being a member of a club, visiting other amateurs, setting up your station in a suitcase or a backpack, on a bicycle, in a car, on a bus, or in a boat are some of the many other avenues open to you.

    That said, there is something magical about building your own shack. It has the ability to transform your hobby and if you have the opportunity, I can highly recommend it and I'd like to encourage you to consider the notion.

    As I've said previously, there is plenty of exploration and learning associated with putting one together. After you've spent some time reflecting, planning, designing, sourcing, building and testing the environment where you do amateur radio, you're likely to reach a point where you'll refer to that space as "your shack". You might even come to think of it as your shack, rather than a collection of trade offs that you've constructed in the best way you know how.

    Inevitably, you'll wonder what to do next.

    Several things come to mind. Creature comforts is probably the most obvious, a push to talk foot pedal, or a desk microphone, either on a stand or hanging from a boom, an audio mixer, a couch, a soldering station, a microwave oven, a fan, or air conditioning, in other words, plenty of opportunities for improvement and enhancement.

    Then there's computing, something that might interest you, or not. It offers the ability to explore a whole different side of amateur radio, from logging through to digital modes, from weak signal propagation to tracking satellites, the possibilities are endless.

    Your shack is also potentially a communal place where you can meet with your friends to share the experience.

    It's a place for contemplation, for relaxation, for "being" an amateur. All of it is open to you as possibility, an excuse to improve and enhance.

    The thing is, that too will come to a point of, let's call it "completion", and you're left with more questions.

    Amateur radio is inherently experimental in nature, that's the whole point of the pursuit. Your licence gave you access to the playground, your shack is that playground. Now it's up to you to play.

    Of course what playing looks like is unique to you. Over the past 15 years I've been describing what playing looks like to me, and from the over 3 million downloads last year from my website alone, not to mention the newsletters, rebroadcasts, podcast inclusions, other streaming services, news reports, social media and messages I've received, they've encouraged you to explore and investigate this wondrous activity.

    The point is, the shack you just completed isn't finished and hopefully it never will be. Whichever one it is, the first one, the one after that or the next one, your shack is a place where you can experiment, learn, discover, test, fail, succeed, challenge and enjoy the hobby of amateur radio. It's not the only place where you'll find this hobby, but it's your place.

    So, have at it.

    I'm Onno VK6FLAB
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    4 m
  • Building a shack: Part 7 - Powering your shack

    Building a shack: Part 7 - Powering your shack
    Jan 24 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio On your amateur radio journey, you'll likely discover that many transceivers run on 13.8 volt DC, give or take. For example my FT-857d requires 13.8 volt plus or minus 15 percent, with a negative ground, and a current draw of 22 ampere, more on that later. In other words, the power supply needs to be between about 11.7 and 15.9 volts, the same voltage that runs most vehicles with some wiggle room for fluctuating alternator charging cycles. While some radios will absolutely fit in your car, there's plenty where that just isn't the case, even though they're set-up for a 13.8 volt power supply. You might think of it as an anachronism, a few steps removed from spark gap transmitters, but there's more to the story. Most residential power grids run on AC power, at varying voltages and frequencies between 50 and 60 Hz. Across the world there's eight different AC voltages in use between 100 and 240 volts. Some countries use more than one combination and I haven't even looked at three phase power. Perhaps 13.8 volt DC isn't looking quite as odd. With this revelation comes the need to actually have 13.8 volt available in your shack. Converting your grid power to something you can plug your gear into requires some form of transformation, typically achieved with a power supply. Efficient, cheap and plentiful, the switch mode power supply is the most common. Built to a price, they're also often noisy, not just the fan, but noisy from a radio emissions perspective. Amateur radio has very sensitive receivers and as a result you can often hear, or see if you have a waterfall display, RF birdies, a sound reminiscent of a budgie whistling, every 100 kHz or so across the whole radio spectrum. Not something most other equipment cares about, so you're often left to fend for yourself in figuring out how to deal with this phenomenon. There's plenty of filtering techniques and circuits to be found and some of them even work, but for my money, I'd spend it on a power supply that doesn't make noise in the first place. A regulated power supply maintains a constant output voltage or current, regardless of variations in load or input voltage. An unregulated power supply can wander all over the place. Adjustable power supplies allow you to set the voltage, amperage, or both, sometimes with knobs, sometimes using external controls. At this point you might decide that this is all too hard and you want to do away with all this complexity and use a Sealed Lead Acid, or SLA battery, after all, that's what the 13.8 volt is based on, but then you'll need to charge it. Similarly, picking any battery technology requires some form of charging. Another word for charger is: power supply, often a switch mode one, and likely not filtered in any way that matters to you, since batteries, and for that matter solar power inverters, are unlikely to care about RF birdies. I will make mention of linear power supplies. When I started on this journey, this was the strong recommendation from my peers as the most desirable option. Although they're significantly less efficient than switch mode power supplies, only 30 percent versus better than 80 percent, from an RF perspective, they're extremely quiet. Of course, the lack of efficiency reveals itself in the form of heat, which necessitates the application of cooling, from a fan, often a very noisy fan. One potential source of power supply is a computer power supply unit or PSU. Before you go down that route, consider that they're intended for installation inside a case, often generate various voltages at very specific current draws and are not typically known for being RF quiet. After weighing up all the variables, I chose a laboratory grade switch mode current limiting adjustable power supply. It's set to 13.8 volt and it sits on my desk doing its thing. Rated at 1 to 15 volts at 40 ampere, it's now as old as I am in amateur radio terms, well and truly a teenager, it's also overkill, by quite a margin. Remember when I mentioned that my FT-857d is rated at drawing 22 ampere? As a QRP or low power station I typically use my transmitter set to 5 watt, but even when others use it at full power, I have never ever seen it draw more than 12 ampere. That's not to say that it can't draw 22, I've just never seen it. As a benefit of having such a massive overkill in the specifications of my power supply, I can power more than one radio and not notice. Not that they're all transmitting at the same time, or using more than 5 watt, it just doesn't matter. I previously discussed setting a standard for coax connectors in the shack, the same is true for deciding what to pick for power supply connectors. In my case I chose Anderson Powerpole connectors. Pins come in 15, 30 and 45 ampere ratings, are genderless and housings are available in many different colours. When I say genderless, it means that you can join two identical connectors. Within my shack, I use the RACES or ...
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    8 m
  • Building a shack: Part 6 - Noise

    Building a shack: Part 6 - Noise
    Jan 17 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Noise la la la la la hinders if I were a rich man effective a noise annoys an oyster communication but a noisy noise annoys an oyster more. Or said differently, when you're trying to communicate, something that the hobby of amateur radio does in spades, you'll need to deal with a phenomenon called noise. This noise comes in different forms, but the effect is the erection of barriers to successful communication. We refer to the impact of noise as a signal to noise ratio or SNR, the signal being the desired information, the noise the undesired interference. Expressed in decibels so you can deal with a massive range using a small number, an SNR greater than 0 dB means that the signal is stronger than the noise. Building a shack requires that you consider noise in many forms. If you've been a radio amateur for a few moments, your mind is likely to head straight for the hiss, crackle and pop you might hear whilst attempting to communicate on HF, but there's a few other things to discuss. There's all sorts of electronic noise received by your radio. In addition, there's audio noise picked up by your ears, and often your microphone. Then there's the noise that you produce, either from your transmitter into the rest of the building, or from your mouth or speakers into the ears of the people you share the space with. Starting with audio, having a space that you can close the door on is a good way to limit the noise coming into and leaving your shack. An alternative is to wear headphones and generate text to speech, or prerecord your voice, ready for a contact, potentially ideal for contesting, not so much for free form discussion. Another consideration is audio from other radios, including those tuned to a local broadcaster, or aviation frequencies. In other words, if you're transmitting with a microphone, make sure that there's no other audio coming through. In some cases it's even illegal to transmit that audio, but in all cases it's noise that makes communication more difficult. This kind of audio noise mitigation is pretty straightforward. In stark contrast, achieving the same with electronic noise is pretty much a balancing act between budget and effectiveness. The impact of noise is inversely proportional to distance. Essentially, the closer it is, the more impact it has. With that in mind, when you start dealing with noise, start nearby and work your way out. As you eliminate the nearby noise, other sources will become apparent. Without turning this into a noise mitigation class, the process is essentially one of elimination. First locate the noise source, then eliminate it. That's easier said than done. For example, if the noise source is a power supply sitting on your bench, you can turn it off, except if that power supply is the one powering your radio, so perhaps I should say: "attempt to eliminate it" instead. There's plenty of ways to have a go at this and volumetric kilotons of content published on the subject, some of it even useful. In many, but not all cases, noise is an electrical phenomenon that enters via any means possible and you'll need to attempt noise mitigation at multiple points of entry. Obvious sources are the power supply, coax and the antenna connection, the speaker cable, the microphone lead, and if you're using a computer, the USB, serial or Ethernet cable and within the computer itself. Each requiring different approaches. The obvious one is to disable the noise, that is, turn off the offending device. As I said, that might not be an option, but you can replace noisy gear, or place it further away. There's isolation, using tools like ferrites and chokes to stop the noise from reaching your radio. Often in the form of a clip-on blob, you'll find these on things like monitor and USB cables. Place the ferrite as close as possible to the input of your radio. If it's loose on the cable, wind it through the ferrite, the tighter the better. There's software solutions with varying levels of effectiveness. You'll find DSP or Digital Signal Processing knobs and buttons on many radios. They're generally helpful for narrowband repeating noises, like the hum of an electric motor or power supply. There's tools that attempt to impose a noise on your signal that cancels out the noise, anti-noise, if you like, by receiving the noise, inverting it and adding it to your signal, thus, at least theoretically, eliminating it, noise minus noise is silence. This can take the form of a device for noise coming in from the antenna, but it also applies to things like noise cancelling speakers. In audio this is called active noise cancelling. There's also a new crop of noise cancelling software, using A.I. or Assumed Intelligence, that captures your signal, attempts to figure out what's noise and what's not, removes the noise and then feeds it back to you. Your Mileage May Vary and if you break it, you get to keep both parts. Consider your privacy and security...
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    8 m
  • Building a shack: Part 5 - Antenna Shenanigans

    Building a shack: Part 5 - Antenna Shenanigans
    Jan 10 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Putting your station together is best described as a juggling act, since you'll discover that everything depends on everything else and the more you plan, the more you learn and the more variables become apparent, none more so than with the selection of an antenna. Antennas are endlessly variable. To give you a taste, imagine a loop of wire, shaped like a circle. As you stretch the circle, it becomes an oval, if you pull on four corners, it's a square, pull it tight between two points and it more or less becomes a single wire. In other words, one piece of wire can essentially make an infinite number of antennas, and we haven't even varied the material, length, thickness or coating. So, to discuss antennas is to embark on a lifelong journey of exploration and me telling you to get one over another is not going to help, instead I'd like to discuss some considerations that you might not have encountered. The obvious issue of space is generally the first consideration. Then there's the neighbours and their sense of aesthetics, or lack thereof. There's local laws to abide by and sometimes permissions and permit requirements, though in many cases it seems that seeking forgiveness is a quicker route to success. Your Mileage May Vary. Talk to your local amateur club. There's the property owner to consider. If that's you, great, drill away, if not, you will need to tailor your antenna selection to the amount of renovations required. If you live in a restricted location where there are all manner of rules about the things that you cannot do, you might need to think carefully about your options. Stealthy antennas are a thing. As I've said previously, inside your roof might be an option, but there are others. Some examples to consider. If there's a TV aerial on your roof, will that look similar to a 70cm Yagi, or could it hide a 2m vertical? Do you have a metal gutter which might act as an antenna, or could you use Christmas light clips to hang a wire antenna from your gutters? Could you hide a vertical in a plastic down-pipe? Could you dangle a ladder-line antenna out a window at night, or use thin wire to hold up your plants while hiding your antenna in the garden, or can you use a beverage antenna that's lying on the ground, or hidden under the fence capping? Could you tune up your fence for that matter? In other ways to make your hobby look invisible in plain sight, could you use an antenna that looks like a roof vent, or if you're into moon bounce, could you repurpose a satellite dish? Could you make your outdoor washing line into an antenna or add a flagpole vertical antenna that also happens to soothe your vexillology sensibilities? While we're talking stealth, you can paint your antenna to match the decor. To get your antenna up in the air, could you use a length of wood, a pool cleaning or painters pole, strapped to your pergola, gazebo, balcony railing, or some other existing structure? Can you use the edging of a shade sail, professionally installed, it comes complete with mounting points. It doesn't stop there, I've heard of several amateurs who managed to park a sailboat, with the mast up, in their driveway without ever once floating it in a nearby body of water. Of course this is not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be, it's really a trigger to think about some options you might not have discovered. In other words, if you need stealth, you can be creative, rather than buy an antenna off the shelf. Speaking of buying off the shelf, there's nothing quite like buying a wonderful antenna, the answer to all your questions, only to discover that it needs tuning and tweaking, to the point where you might spend a year getting familiar with all its quirks. That's not to discourage you from picking that path, just to warn you that there is no such thing as the perfect antenna. If you are less space restricted, building a tower or a mast, the difference being that a tower stands all by itself, like the one in Paris, a mast needs guy-wires to keep it up. You'll likely need to consider failure, engineering standards and concrete, not to mention maintenance. So, how do you go about selecting the perfect antenna to suit your needs? In the same way that a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat. In other words, there's a trick. It's pretty simple, start small. With that I mean, start with a simple wire antenna. It will achieve a number of things that only experience will give you. For starters, it will prove that your shack works. As-in, end-to-end. That might not sound like a big deal, but there are many different moving parts in building a successful shack, making your first contact is going to be a milestone worth logging, more on that another day. While making your first contact is momentous, getting an antenna in the air will also allow you to hear what your neighbourhood sounds like. Is it completely RF quiet, in which case, where do you live and do you have a spare ...
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    6 m
  • Building a shack: Part 4 - coaxial cable alternatives

    Building a shack: Part 4 - coaxial cable alternatives
    Jan 3 2026
    Foundations of Amateur Radio When you start the process of getting your hobby off the ground, either for the first time, or after a hiatus, you might be left with the impression that the only way to "do amateur radio" is to have a shack, a place where you can set-up your gear, and connected to that gear using coax, one or more antennas. While that's a common scenario, it's not the only one at your disposal. We are after all in the game of communication and over the past few decades options have exploded. Starting closest to the traditional radio, coax and antenna, is to consider indoor antennas. There's many to choose from. You can install one in the same room as your shack, or, you can build your antennas in the roof space, either way, invisible from the outside can sometimes be a requirement. Stealth is a topic all its own, and no doubt we'll get to that another time. A word of caution. If you do have an indoor antenna and associated coax, consider your transmitter power levels, since it's likely that given the close proximity, you'll exceed emissions safety standards, or you'll cause harm to other electronic equipment in the building. QRP or low power is a good way to go if this is something you're considering. If we step away from a traditional radio, coax, antenna configuration, you can build your shack in other ways too. For example, you can use a local repeater which you might trigger from a local handheld radio. Often dismissed as being for local communications only, there are thousands of repeaters across the globe offering a variety of bands, frequencies and modes. Often you can access a local repeater that can be connected to a remote one using a bewildering array of technologies, some using the internet, some using traditional RF. You'll find repeaters on 10m, 6m, 2m, 70cm and 23cm. There's nothing stopping you making your own repeater. You don't even need to go through the effort of making it completely standalone, for example, my Yaesu FT-857d has a detachable face-plate or head, connected to the main body by a short cable. There are plenty of other radios with a similar configuration. Presumably designed for the installation in a vehicle, where the head needs to be near the driver and there's unlikely to be space for the body, you can run a longer cable from the head to the body and install it somewhere more convenient. In my case it was bolted underneath the removable floor into the boot next to the spare tyre. There's several solutions that replace the connecting cable with an internet connection. Now, that internet connection can be across the room, from inside your shack to your garage, or between your shack and a remote hill where you have permission to put up a bit of gear. In fact, the same type of setup can be used to connect to shared radios, and companies like Elecraft, Flex Radio and ICOM make specific remote heads that can operate remote radio equipment, marketed as RF decks, without needing to install and maintain computers at either end, but more often than not, this equipment is brand or model specific. Which raises another option. You can connect to remote equipment across the internet using your computer, which means that your shack might be a computer, a laptop, or a mobile phone and your gear might be in a different country. Many radio clubs have discovered that their often extensive radio shack is virtually unused during the week, and have installed remote equipment to allow you as a member to connect, sometimes as part of your membership, sometimes with an extra fee, since there are costs associated with setting this up and keeping it running. At some point you're going to discuss this with other amateurs and you're potentially going to hear someone tell you that this is not "real radio". Considering over a century of radio evolution, from spark-gap through valves, transistors, integrated circuits and software defined radio, where exactly is the "real radio" line drawn? Is using WSPR, RTTY, FT8, Hellschreiber, Olivia, SSTV, PSK31, Domino, MFSK and thousands of other digital modes "real radio"? If the answer to that is an emphatic "yes", then ask yourself, how do you actually use those modes? The answer looks suspiciously like a computer running digital mode software, either connected to a physical radio in the same room, or connected to one across the internet. In other words, with the proliferation of communication alternatives, amateur radio is evolving. No doubt it will evolve further. So, today, a perfectly viable, and some might say, modern, amateur radio shack might not actually have any traditional RF based radio gear, though perhaps a hand-held might be something to consider when you next treat yourself, not because without it you're not a real amateur, but because it opens your world to other means of communication, something which I think is perhaps even more important than building the perfect shack. In other words, you are not required ...
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    6 m
  • Building a shack: Part 3 - the ingress of coaxial cable

    Building a shack: Part 3 - the ingress of coaxial cable
    Dec 27 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio One of the potentially trickier aspects of putting together your shack is connecting the radio to the antenna. On the face of it, the challenge is limited to making sure that you have mating connectors on both ends, but when you actually start implementing this you'll run into several other considerations. The very first one as I said is the connector. Every amateur I've ever spoken to goes through the same process. You pick a connector, typically the one that your radio comes with, then you adapt the connector on your coaxial cable to suit, then you'll get an SWR meter, a dummy load, some testing gear, a coax switch or two, perhaps another radio, or an amplifier and along the way you'll discover that you now have a growing collection of connectors to choose from, and that's just the connectors inside the shack. After considering connectors, you'll start to contemplate the coax itself. You'll likely weigh price against signal loss, but there are other aspects to the selection of the right coax for the job. For example, how do you get the coax actually into the shack? One of the main challenges associated with solving that problem is surprisingly something that rarely affects our hobby, other than any human factors associated with the phenomenon of "weather". Getting coax into a shack generally involves passing through a weather proof barrier of some sort. In doing so, you're likely to create a place where the weather can make its way into places it's not supposed to. Water can and will travel along your coax. Hopefully on the outside of it, but if you're unlucky, on the inside too, likely destroying it along the way. At first glance you'll think that water only travels down with gravity and in an ideal world you'd be right, but as it happens, water will happily do other things like get blown by the wind, or condensate in temperature gradients, like those found near a hole you just created in your lovely weather proof barrier. If your shack has existing openings, they're generally the easiest to appropriate, things like gaps in the eves, existing vent holes, between roof tiles or sheet iron, plenty of existing places where you can get from inside to outside a shack. Note that this is also the case if your shack is a trestle table tucked away in an office, like mine. Before I continue, I'm about to raise some potential safety issues, but I'm not an occupational health and safety professional, so, do your own due diligence. If you do need to go into your roof space, height aside, consider it a dangerous place. Make sure that there's someone to check on you and consider alternatives to climbing up there. Wearing a face mask and full body clothing is a very good idea. Often you'll find exposed wires, deteriorating or toxic insulation and other nasty things, conductivity of steel roof frames and pipes are also a hazard, so be extremely reluctant to venture there. Avoidance is preferable. Working at heights 101: Don't .. that said, there may be no alternative. You can lift corrugated iron sheets by undoing the roofing screws. If you do, make absolutely sure that you don't make a string of water inlet points when you put it all back together. In lifting a sheet, you can access the roof space and run your coax. Sometimes the gap between the corrugation and the rafters is sufficient to push the coax through, but if you live in a hot climate, make sure that it doesn't touch the sheeting, since coax is likely to distort, if not outright melt, if it's in direct contact with the iron sheet while the sun is belting down on it. Consider the temperature rating of your coax. Similarly, terracotta roof tiles tend to have enough space to allow coax to enter the roof space. Be very careful, since they're often fragile and potentially irreplaceable. Look for openings like existing roof fittings, things like chimneys, vent pipes, roof ridges, etc. for simpler points of entry. If you need to make a hole in your roof and seal it, there's special rubber grommets for this purpose. You cut a little opening in the grommet, too tight for the coax, then force it through. Seal to the roof with UV-stable silicone and you're good to go. Check them every so many years, they deteriorate. Speaking of silicone, if there's an existing hole that you're using, don't just seal it up, it might be there for a reason. Windows often have vent holes or gaps that will fit some types of coax and there's inserts you can use to open a sliding window that will accommodate coax, but consider the security of that window before you commit. There's also special flat coax for running through a window frame or under a door, but check before you buy that they're suitable for the job. Ladder line is also an option, it's much thinner, can travel longer distances, but its performance can be affected by corrugated iron and other conductors. Rarely if ever does the initial acquisition of coaxial cable involve details ...
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    10 m
  • Building a shack: Part 2 - How much space do you need?

    Building a shack: Part 2 - How much space do you need?
    Dec 20 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio When you start on the journey of putting together a shack, in whatever form that eventually takes, you'll need to figure out how much space is required. Of course, no matter what you choose, it's never enough, but you have to start somewhere. Ultimately a shack is a work in progress. As an aside, I'm using the word "shack", but that is really an amateur concept, so we're not necessarily talking about a plot of land with a wooden lean-to cobbled together from bits of wood collected from your beachcomber days. Not that it can't be that, but it doesn't have to be. As I've said, my "shack" is a wooden trestle table, I know shacks that are a dedicated room in a house, a converted garage, a garden shed, a warehouse office, a radio station, an out building, several scout halls, demountables, a converted passenger bus and plenty more. In this context, in referring to "shack", I mean, "the place where my radio lives when I get on-air to make noise", but "shack" runs off the tongue a little easier. Budget aside, in order to attempt to quantify your space requirements, you need to figure out what you're going to do with it. This perhaps sounds a little ludicrous, since the answer is "amateur radio" .. duh .. obviously. Okay, so, here's some questions. Does amateur radio for you mean any of the following: operating the local repeater, HF radio, solo or with visitors, listening to multiple stations, operating multiple bands simultaneously, computers, Morse code, contesting, soldering, building, experimentation and plenty more. While we're at it, if you're into soldering, is that with valves, discrete components, or integrated circuits, and what levels of existing bits and pieces do you have? I'm asking because the racks of jars, component trays and drawers I've seen over the past fifteen years often rival the actual shack for size. In other words, when you're thinking about .. what .. you want to do, be specific. For me, amateur radio is more about computers and less about soldering irons, that's not to say that I don't own a soldering iron, just that its use is incidental, rather than fundamental, computers, keyboards and monitors on the other hand, for me, are part and parcel of my amateur radio experience. Truth be told, if I could, I'd try to eliminate all the analogue radios from my shack and replace them with a single box capable of wide band operation across the amateur bands that I could control with a computer. I realise that this is not a universal picture of what amateur radio means, but it's what it means for me because it represents the ultimate level of flexibility. That said, I love my FT-857d. I have several other radios that I loan out from time-to-time to new amateurs while they find their feet. I love to experiment with those as well, so my shack needs space for temporary set-ups. While I enjoy chewing the fat over a cup of coffee, I rarely get on-air and make noise with anyone else. That's not because I don't appreciate it, but because I've yet to discover an effective way of filtering interference, a topic for another day. Even if you're not a computer nerd like me, there's a high probability that a shack today includes a computer of some description, for record keeping, propagation forecasts, logging, and digital modes. So it's a good idea to imagine yourself actually doing your planned activities and speculating what kinds of things you'll need. Like, where do you put your cup of coffee, your keyboard and your Morse key? While we're discussing putting things down. Think about the ability to actually use these things, not just where they live. It's no fun balancing a keyboard and trying to reach over the top to change the operating frequency, or having to strain your neck to look at the logging screen when you've made that elusive contact, so think about the ergonomics of what you're planning. Right now I have a wire shelving unit sitting on my desk. It's 80 cm tall, 90 cm wide and 30 cm deep. The two shelves are adjustable in height. Currently one is at the highest point, the other has enough space to fit a base-station radio underneath it, about 13 cm from the lowest point. It's not ideal, since it means that the keyboard is in front of it. During the previous iteration, of which there have been several, my monitors were in front of this and the keyboard was an external one connected to a laptop to the right of the screen, allowing me to have two screens to display information. The idea was that I'd use the computer to control the transceivers using a protocol called CAT. This never happened, so operating was awkward to say the least and as a result, hardly used. Instead the FT-857d sat on top of the bottom shelf, using a sound card to operate on digital modes. A slightly better operating angle, were it not for the monitor that hid it from view. As I said, not ideal. I'm mentioning all this to give you a picture of at least one other shack but in...
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    7 m
  • Building a shack: Part 1 - Setting the Scene

    Building a shack: Part 1 - Setting the Scene
    Dec 13 2025
    Foundations of Amateur Radio Recently it occurred to me that I haven't been using HF in my shack for much longer than I'd care to admit. Over the years I've spoken about my shack and how it's set-up, more on that shortly. I effectively went off-air when I decommissioned the computer that was running tools like "fldigi" and "WSJT-X". Mainly because it was too slow, for example, taking a good minute to launch a copy of Firefox. After that I repurposed my HF antenna for use with my ultra low power WSPR beacon experiments and essentially ceased being a functional HF station. There's other forces at work, which I'll get to, but before I do, in discussion with a fellow amateur we discovered that my desire to get back on-air on HF is essentially the same journey that a new amateur might make and the idea was hatched to document the process and share it with you. In the past you've heard me say that the answer to most questions associated with amateur radio is: "it depends". As a new, or returning amateur, this might not be very helpful if you don't know what it depends on, so, I'm going to attempt to describe the process of determining how to get to the answers required to make a station. Now, before I start I'd like to talk about money. I'm raising this upfront because your access to a budget determines many of the choices that are open to you. You could interpret that to mean that you need money and while that helps, it's not universally true, in fact I'd go so far as to say that you could get on-air and make noise using nothing more than a mobile phone and an internet connection, which truth be told is pretty much the minimum requirement to enjoy my thoughts, so perhaps that's the base requirement. That said, even if you don't have access to that, there's other options that we'll no doubt explore together, so keep that in mind. I think that the very first thing to consider is what you think of when you hear the term "amateur radio". I've said it before and I'll say it again. Amateur Radio is a great many things to different people. For some it means a hand-held radio and chatting with mates on the local repeater, for others it means a full blown HF contest station with multiple antennas and radios, with integrated logging in a dedicated building. For others it means logging into a remote WebSDR and listening to the bands, decoding interesting signals, and license permitting, transmitting remotely across the internet. In other words, the "amateur radio" experience is unique to you. What you get from it is dependent on you and nobody else. As an aside, that's also true for licensing. If you have a "beginners" license, like my Foundation license, then it's entirely up to you to decide if and when you add extra privileges. "Foundations of Amateur Radio", well, its predecessor, "What use is an F-call?" emerged specifically in response to amateurs around me who continued to, let's be kind and call it "encourage" me to "upgrade" to a "real" license. Fifteen years on, I'm still a Foundation "beginner" and thus far I have yet to run out of things to do or talk about, so keep that in mind. I think that covers the disclaimers, no doubt more will occur to me as we continue on this journey. For the first decade or so of having a license, most of my activity was done in my car, a mobile shack of sorts. I didn't have access to a space where I could set-up a radio without running the risk of someone tripping over coax, or a landlord complaining within an hour of me erecting a temporary vertical. In other words, my mobile shack was born from necessity. It was helpful in exploring the limitless variation of operating positions, as-in locations and their impact on propagation, antenna performance, local interference, and plenty of other lessons. So, even if you don't have a permanent space to operate, there's plenty of amateur radio to go round. When I finally moved to a place where I had space, I started the process of putting together my shack. Initially it was pretty much integrated with my home-office. This sort of worked, but both the office and the shack suffered from this combination, so my first observation is that, in my experience, setting aside a dedicated space for a shack is a good idea. Now, right now, as I am telling you that, to the bottom right of my computer screen is the head of my Yaesu FT-857d, connected to a "RemoteRig", a pair of devices that replace the serial cable between the head and the radio with a network connection. The RemoteRig is connected to a WiFi router, which runs a dedicated wireless connection across the room to the WiFi router that's connected to the radio, sitting on what's left of my shack. It's how I run the weekly F-troop net. It's sitting there because I need to be able to access my computer to make log entries and track who's next in the round-robin discussion, and as I said, I've decommissioned my shack computer. Which brings me to the second point. Setting up...
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