The shack here is housed in a 10 by 12 foot timber shed, attached to the rear of my garage.
It's double skined, with a 2 inch layer of good quality insulation in between. the roof, floor and walls are insulated, and I've installed a large double convector radiator making it quite comfortable, even in winter.
The entrance door faces east, with the 12 foot walls running east west.
The door is in the middle of the east wall, with the corners helping to form a cupboard on each side.
These cupboards contain various items, such as shoe boxes of qsl cards, boxes of connectors, leads and cables and peices of unused equipment. I have also
several photo albums, at least one for each band, containing a qsl for each confirmed dxcc entity.
A fairly substancial 30 inch wide bench runs along the remainder of the north side, continuing at a right angle along the west wall to form an l shape.
Heading right to left along the north facing bench, there is a Rotel cd player, and a Nad hi-fi amp on top, these are 20 and 15 years old respectively, but still sound quite good.
Left of the hifi gear, sits the shack computer, an old pentium 2.8 which is beginning to show it's age,a 17" monitor, with a set of small pc speakers either side purely for speech, and an external hd.
Above the bench are a pair of bookshelf KEF speakers mounted on wall brackets. Between which there is a display cabinet containing my collection of 1/50th scale diecast model trucks.
Under the bench I have a chest of drawers, storing around 650 cd albums. These are prity much unused since I've converted the whole lot to flac, and are stored on pc now.
The bench forming the other leg of the right angle runs along the west facing wall, and accommodates the radio equipment.
right to left, is a Palstar 1km atu, Acom 1000 linear used mainly for 6 metres, my Alpha 91b which is the main HF amp, and the FT1000MP.
Left of the MP is my ft847 which I use on 6 metres, and a 4 metre transverter awaiting an antenna one of these days. There is also a Kenwood tr751e with a dodgy af gain control, needing repair.
Above the main bench runs a shelf on which lives the rotator controller, P2000 swr/power meter, the ldg tw1 and 2 meters, and the control box for my Steppir Yagi.
There are a couple of low pass filters for HF and 50 mhz, a 4 way antenna switch, and the senser for the p2000 screwed to the wall underneath the operating bench. A 30 amp psu also sits under here as well.
The shack has it's own ring main, with a master switch. in addition I have 4 8 way surge protected units, providing plenty of mains sockets.
Above the radio gear, on the wall are a few plaques and pictures pertaining to Liverpool football, or if you prefer, "soccer" club,
of which I've been a fan since childhood.
Along the south facing wall there are a couple of salvaged chests of drawers which store all sorts of stuff, like blank cds, stationery, and other assorted junk! My trusty Perkins sits on top of here.
This wall also has a double glazed window.
Finally scattered around the place are various sundry curiousities, such as a peice of the timber mast of a fishing boat I once owned, and bits and peices of stuff made by my kids in school.
The antenna system at present consists of a 3 element Steppir Yagi, with the 40/30 metre driven element dipole kit, on a 60ft crank-up tower.
I plan to reduce this to a 2 element, to make room for probably a 6 element Yagi for 6 metres, and a 5 Element for the 4 metre or 70 mhz bands. I was hoping to make these changes this year, but due to lack of available help, it will probably be next spring.
My next chalenge is to get some sort of antenna up for 80 metres, is I've really not done anything on that band to date.
This will probably be an inverted l, however given that a sizable area of my garden is paved, an effecient radial system is going to prove difficult.
Apologies for what has turned out to be a rather lengthy post, and hope it hasn't sent too many of you to sleep smile!
Best 73,
Tim.
Bangor, N. Ireland.
Skype: tim-crawford
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