Friday, February 3, 2023

New Shack

For a very long time I used my detached workshop as the "Shack".  It was 100 feet away from the house and although it has heat and power, it is a hike (and I don't like having to walk back and forth between the house in the dark -- when chasing DX at night, a refill of the coffee Thermos).

Also, given that the heir-apparent is no longer living with us, we have a collection of stuff in the garage that I'd like to relocate.

An idea came to me that I have this all swapped.   I'm going to revise the Garage and make it the workshop and then move all of the boxes and stuff to the old Shop.  This means making a new "Shack" and that gives me some opportunities.

It will let me re-build a bench and electronics work-area.  It'll be heated and it will be connected to the house so I don't have to stumble around in the dark when I am up past 2am working DX.

The only glitch is that in order to re-route the antenna feeds, I will need to be creative because there are some gardening/shrubs and other things I don''t want to disturb.

But if I can resolve the feed-line routing and the existing antennas can still be reached via the feedlines I have access to, this should work.

Put another way, when I started out in ham radio, I had practically no equipment so the "Yaesu Map of the World" was easy to mount and see from the operating station.  With all the gear I've collected over the years and in use, the gear is now making it difficult to operate -- too much gear in too dense a location.  This new "Shack" plan will alleviate that.

When I get to that point, I'll post!

But the goal is to do the shuffling of boxes/stuff from one place to the other.

No QSO, no Donut

On the very last day the cafe was open, they sold the special donuts -- one had to pre-order them.  I got one of the last "Jam Filled&q...