A beginner operating from Skara, Sweden
I outgrew the tiny closet and built a proper office/workshop inside my garage. Half of the new space is set up with my work desktop and future ham station, and the other half holds the workshop part with my laser cutter, 3D printers and work table.
It’s very cluttered at the moment, so I’ll post pictures some other time.
I recently got introduced to DMR and bought msyelf an AnyTone D878UVII Plus, got it programmed and had my first couple of international QSOs within a day. Wonderful stuff this! Perfect entry way for hams who don’t want to get stuck on the technical side, but actually get past that mic fright.
So now I’m thinking about what HF antennas I can fit on my roof, to get back on the real waves with this newfound courage.
I currently lurk mostly on 1206 Regional SM6 and 1216 Swedenlink, but go ahead and call on DMR ID 2400649 on the Brandmeister if you want to get my attention.
73!
This is my “shack” before the modification. It’s not tidy enough to earn that name, therefore the quotes. My loud computer is to the right of my nice silver mic there on the table. The side is open to reduce the need of high fan speed and the accompanying loud noise.
On the other side of this wall is my garage. It is not always cold but it’s always cooler than the “shack”. So SA6ANW (All Night Whisky) came up with the brilliant idea to put the computer in the garage. Here’s a marking for the hole.
After some difficulty making a straight hole the size of a small plumbing pipe with the longest drill bit covering only half the thickness of the wall, I finally got to feed some wires through.
I “built” a nice “shelf” to out my power supply and my PC on, and connected it all.
That’s my wood lathe right beneath. I’ll have to invent a dust screen before I ever use it again.
This is a view from the “shack” side. The first three holes hit the piece of wood that holds the adjacent wall there, so I moved to the left.
And, the final result, a “shack” without noise, and a computer that can run its fan without disturbing me.
An old mini TV combined with a Raspberry Pi can make for something completely new and different!
Now I just need to add external ethernet and USB ports, and perhaps install RetroPi on the memory card!
The signal to noise ratio was way to low so I built this circuit around the mic.
I used the only resistors I had so my circuit has 300 ohm ones where the diagram has 10 kohm ones. 
Result:
I had a pile of crap behind me in my tiny shack. I decided to make use of the space instead!
I made a video too, of course.
A Panadapter is know by many names. The most scientific and correct might be “radio spectrum scope”, but the most common in the ham sphere is “panadapter” or “pan-adaptor” in my short experience. Basically, it’s a wide panoramic view of a radio spectrum.
For a ham, it’s normally used in conjunction with a transceiver or a set of transceivers. It’s also common that the computer doing the spectrum visualization is connected to the transceiver via CAT or similar, so that a click in the spectrum view tunes the transceiver to the desired frequency.
To achieve this you can invest in really expensive SDR hardware, or you can go this route (amongst others), which I did with my Kenwood TS-570D:
Tonight I had my first QSO that wasn’t planned on Facebook! SA6CKL broke in when me and SA6ANW were talking about sound cards for websdr and had a quick chat with us. I’m so happy!
To celebrate, I broke in the awesome logbook I got with my yaesu, and put up the awesome poster I got with my yaesu!
They weren’t in the yaesu box so I’m guessing the great guys over at Mobinet Communications had something to do with that. Thanks! They’re really awesome! 🙂
