KC7NJB

My other Shack is a School Bus. This is what I have in my indoor shack.

Equipment

For a while, I was rentng a house on Bainbridge Island, WA. I did't want to drill holes in the walls. The neighborhood was pretty clear about not wanting antennas on the houses. And, my best route to ground went out the window and down 1 floor.

Rather than make an investment in working around all of these restrictions, I decided to build an HF shack in my truck. I bought a 100W Yaesu FT-857D which covers 160m - 70cm, including 60m and 6m. I was eyeing the Icom 706 for a long time. The clincher from Yaesu was the Active Tuing Antena System (ATAS-120), which extends and retracts the antenna coil coupling to tune the antenna to the operating frequency. To reduce the time it takes to tune for the 2m and 70cm bands, I've added a dual-band mag-mount antenna that I picked up at HRO, while I was picking up a remote control mic (Yaesu MH-59A8J). I wrote about this in my blog.

For Internet access, I bought a Chromebook from Hewlett-Packard (HP 14-Q039wm). It has Wi-Fi, but also has 200MB of 4G data per month for life. This isn't a lot. But, it will give me a lot of QRZ lookups while I'm operating somwhere that Wi-Fi isn't available. To make sure that it has power, I bought an auto power adapter. For other devices, I've added a 4-port 2.4amp USB power strip, which can charge my tablet, cellphone, Kindle, or a number of other items that my daughter may bring in the car.

In the house, I put all of my old stuff. On an old coat hanger di-pole, I set up the dual-band IC-2350H, mounted under a free floating bookshelf from Ikea. Also mounted under the shelf are two Ikea LED disc lights that I found use 12v DC power. I clipped away the connectors and added Anderson Powerpoles, which allows it to connect into the batteries on which I run everything else. In addition, I've purchased a few BAOFENG radios: an 82L,3 UV-5RA and 3 888s.

I still have the old scout and the HTX-10, and set them up for fun, on occasion. I've also purchased some antennas, like my G5RV jr., just to eliminate lengthy setups on field day.

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