Station Tour
Equipment Rundown
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~ Yaesu FT-1000 Mark V field. |
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Another view of my equipment. (click picture for much larger view in new window) |
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It's wall to wall as you can see, but very comfortable and cozy! I spend hours in my little "ham cave" |
Building the Shack
| My sons Daniel and Hilary helped me built a custom designed, shack for just me and my wheelchair. Here's the start of the framing. |  |
| We live in Florida, so hurricane clips are mandatory between everything, especially between roof rafters and wall studs. |  |
| Here's Hilary, putting up siding. He really enjoys helping out on projects. |  |
| Roofing going up..... There's nothing more unpleasent than installing roofing shingles in Florida in August! You might notice that we've moved the shack, to the north side of the tower, where it will live. |  |
| Wood core, steel door, opening out. |  |
| Daniel installs insulation between the wall studs. |
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| Here's the ham shack, all painted, trimmed out and ready for action! Yes, it's small, but works great! |  |
| Some detail of our trimming out of the shack. It almost looks like we know what we're doing! |  |
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Closeup of the antenna grounding system. It's a 1/4 inch thick piece of aluminium, with gas discharge lightning units all mounted into it. The 1/0 cable out the bottom, goes only 2 feet to a grounding system. The cover on the left allows the cables to exit the inside of the shack, but keeps out the rain. There's pre-drilled holes for 3 more lightning arresters. A ground bar in the shack takes care of equipment grounding inside. |
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Mobile Station
I retired my little red pickup truck, but here's some old pictures of how I had it set up for HF in case you need some ideas! I've moved the 857d radio to our Kia mini van. Pictures of the new installation in the Projects area.
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| From my old Ford Ranger, I made many QSO's and net checkins.. (You can just see my home built wheelchair ramp at the back of the truck) |
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My Mobile rig is a Yaesu FT-857 which gives me HF, VHF and UHF in one neat package. I rigged up a home made bracket for the control head, which sits just in front of the stock radio (that never gets used anyway) A Mag-mount 5/8 wave antenna in the center of the roof provides for 2m and 70cm. |
| For HF work I used to run with a simple Hamstick, into a home made mount screwed into the bed of the truck. However, I found myself struggling in and out of the truck too often to remove the antenna so I could enter the many hosptal parking garages, drive-thrus etc. So... |
| I built this simple tilt-over system, relocating the 20 meter and 2m/70cm antennas to just behind the cab. The antennas now tilt just enough to give me a nice low 7 foot clearance, so now I fit in all the parking garages, drive-thrus etc. In an effort to do this project as cheaply as possible, I used a $10 screen door closer for the piston. I just removed the air bleed screw and tapped it out for a 1/4 inch nipple. I quick shot of compressed air from inside the cab, and the antennas tilt over. To raise them again, I just open a small valve to bleed off the air in the system, and the screen door piston does what it's designed to do, and closes! The piston maintains pressure even over-night, so my antennas will stay down while parked in a low garage. I had fabricated the steel parts using my CNC plasma cutter, then welded them together. The entire project cost less than $15.00 SWR is 1:1, and I've already worked DX with my new mobile antenna setup. |  |
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One note about the antenna, I still need to add a nice flexible ground down to the truck body from the antenna mounting plate, and I'll probably put some more paint on it... Feel free to copy the design to adapt to your own use. |
Feb 27, 2007 After some thought, and having the need for the antennas to go down flatter for a lower parking garage, I moved the pushrod to a new location. I also addded a shock cord to help pull the mount down from the new, flatter position. This makes the hightest part of the antenna 6 feet off the ground, allowing me to go into lower garages. |
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Here's a view of the mount folded over. It works much better now for getting into very short parking garages. I've had several readers tell me that they're building similar mounts for their hf antennas. |
| I've had several requests for some simple plans, on how I constructed my mount, so here they are below: |
