Foundations of Amateur Radio

///////////////////////////////////////////
Messy shacks are the way we do things around here.

Posted: 26 Nov 2016 09:00 AM PST


Foundations of Amateur Radio In my time as a member of the radio community
I've been in around 30 different shacks and a similar amount of camp-out
style activations. I've operated at least a hundred different radio set-ups
with different operating styles, logging systems and power sources. I
wouldn't say that I was particularly experienced, but I've seen enough to
make some observations. My first observation is that radio shacks and
set-ups tend to be messy. It's not unusual to see several radios, antenna
tuners, amplifiers, switches, computers, power supplies, soldering iron
and accumulated cruft in the form of resistors, wires, spare antennas,
connectors, screws, knobs and globs of solder, all vying for space on the
same bench at the same time. I'm looking at my own desk right now and I
can count a hundred different objects within 60 seconds with no effort
what-so-ever, and that's on a desk that's barely larger than a square meter
in size. I'm not particularly messy in the scheme of things. There's no
food on this desk - other than the cup of coffee I've just made and there's
no globs of solder or other sticky things like oil and glue, but still.
One of my friends remarked the other day that no matter how much space we
have, we always seem to run out. He wondered why. At the time, my reply was
something along the lines of: "Well, it's for the same reason as your
bank-account never has enough money in it." While that observation is
probably valid, I'd like to point out some side effects of a messy desk.
If your intent is to operate the radio and get on air to make noise, there
needs to be a working station. You need to be able to test it without
having to move stuff around and fault finding needs to be part of the way
the thing is set-up. One station I visited had solved this problem by
moving their operating station away from the wall so they had two access
points. The front where you operate the station and the back where you test
it. That way you get to have your cake and eat it too. The set-up worked
really well. Picture a few racks with gear, an operating desk arranged in
an L-shape, but moved away from the wall, rather than pushed into the
corner. Space limitations prevented you from walking all the way around it,
but you could get to all but one side of one rack. All this was arranged
into the space of a standard spare bedroom, pretty much the same as most
shack's I've visited. I find myself looking around my own environment with
this front-and-rear idea in mind and I'm having a think about how I might
apply it. Another observation is that we never ever throw anything away,
ever. I have seen antenna projects that were doomed to fail from day one,
spare screws, bits of wood, drawers and drawers of random electronic
components, bits of wire, cut-off connectors, damaged bits of coax,
half-wound baluns, empty tubes of silicone, failed micro-switches, bent
wave guides, broken windings, arced air-gap capacitors, empty boxes,
plastic bags, old radio magazines, all waiting for the day that they become
useful, likely never. I'm not saying that this cruft is never useful. I'm
saying that the chances of them being useful is inversely proportional to
the amount. That means, the more junk you have, the less useful it is.
Perhaps culling is a way to increase the usefulness of what's left. The
ultimate example of something like this is a Go-Cart wheel bearing that I
have lying on my desk. It's a piece of precision engineering, but it's
stuffed. It has completed it's useful service life, was discarded in the
dirt and I picked it up, cleaned it, oiled it and now it sits on my desk.
It looks great, feels nice to play with, but as objects go, it's one of the
least useful items on my desk, otherwise filled with paper, computer gear
and radio gear. I just made the bold step to toss it in the bin. Not yet
sure how I feel about it, but I'll try by saying that it's the beginning of
making the remaining cruft on my desk more...
This posting includes a media file:
http://podcasts.itmaze.com.au/founda...teur-radio.mp3