The Amateur Station

of

N5XO

Click on underlined links below for additional information and photos.

Antenna's and Grounding

My Past Ham Shacks

Mobile & Rovers

As Amateur Radio Operators we never seem to be happy with our shacks as every shack I have ever seen seems to be in a constant state of flux. Seems like we are always remodeling, adding new equipment as needs or budgets permit.

For what ever reason I seem to be worse than the average ham with some times my shacks going through major renovations two and three times in a year. My problem is the priority in how I operate has changed over the years, and as I add more equipment the design seems to never fit. Plus to be honest, I think I enjoy the construction, wiring and design work as much as I do the operating.

Below are photo's of my current shack, and if you click on "My Past Ham Shacks" above you will find the many renovactions of my shack over the years.

Over the past 3 to 4 years, my focus has changed dramatically from HF Dxing and local 2 meter operation to very focused on Weak Signal operation from 6 meters to 23cm. With my HF operation focused strictly on Rag Chewing.

In 2012, I wanted to start adding EME and Meteor scatter to my station capability on 6 meters and 2 meters, plus my VHF/UHF contesting shifted more towards single operator style operating. I need to work on an arrangement that allowed me easy access to logging computers, individual radio's for 6, 2, 1.25, 70cm, 33cm and 23cm operation.

Plus coupled with the fact that my old modular design which I really loved, but required a full tear down if you added or changed any gear became more trouble than it was worth, specially with my bad habit of changing, adding equipment so often. I decided to go fully modular.

We had a custom built radio desk put in, added some additional heavy duty shelving to support all of the amps, etc. Expanded our studio capability giving us studio quality audio from any radio, as well as the ability to record up to 8 individual radio's and 4 at any given time.

This design has worked very well, and we have made several radio changes since we built it, and it's a matter of pulling out the radio we are no longer going to use and installing the new one. With both 12 volt, and 120 drops at every station we are equipped for the future unknowns.

My current shack allows 100% full operation from 160 meters to 23 cm on all bands and all modes. While I still DX on HF and enjoy getting on and having nice long QSO's...most of my efforts are in chasing new grids, cities and states as well as countries on 6 meters to 23cm.

I will be adding a construction page soon, showing the detail put into place on the design of this shack configuration.

Current N5XO Shack

LED lighting was added within the shelves and desk to offer soft Red or Green illumination for operating with out the main over head lights. I prefer this to the bright main room lights, easier on the eyes for the monitors, etc.

TEN TEC Orion II: This is used for 160 to 10 meters HF Operation for DXing as well as rag chewing on the HF bands. Radio feeds one of two amps, Alpha 87A or a Henry 3KD Classic. Multiple dipoles cut for 160 meters and a second one for 80/40 and tune able to 60 meters. 10 to 20 meters is handled by a Log perodic at 46 feet.

The rest of the station is devoted to 6 meters through 23 cm. The VHF/UHF/SHF station is made up of a Flex 5000a, IC-9100 and 2 FT-736R's.

All station logging is performed on one of three Macintosh computers in the shack running MacLoggerDX.....As of June 26th 2014 we have logged 5,224 Contacts on HF 197 Countries, 2,477 6 meter contacts, (WAS, 9 countries, 116 Grids}, 1,492 2 meter contacts {28 states, 87 grids, 2 countries}, 217 1.25 Meter contacts, 354 70cm contacts (7 states 1 country}, 17 23cm contacts {3 states}. Total of 9,781 contacts.