Episode: 2383
Title: HPR2383: What's In My Ham Shack
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2383/hpr2383.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 02:04:01

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This in HPR episode 2,383 entitled, What's in my handshake, and in part of the series,
HAM Radio, QSK, it is hosted by SteamCainer, and in about 37 minutes long, and can in an
explicit flag.
The summary is, I describe the equipment that I have an use in my amateur radio station.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
With 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code, HPR15, that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair, at AnanasThost.com.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, my name is Steve, and I am going to talk to you today about
what is in my handshake.
Now I have participated a couple times in the amateur radio roundtable episodes, and
if anybody remembers following some of the emails related to that, it was suggested
at one point that it would be kind of cool for HAM radio operators to start a show series
called What's in my handshake, and just talk about the equipment that we use, and what
kind of a shack that we have.
This is my attempt at doing that, and I hope that some other HAM radio operators will pick
up the mantle and continue forward with and make this actually a series.
I think it would be kind of interesting, certainly would be interesting to me, and it might
be interesting for those that are learning about amateur radio for the first time.
So I thought I would start by asking the question, well what really is a HAM shack, and I think
that the Wikipedia article for Radio Shack has kind of an introduction that is worth
reading here.
So during radio's early days, equipment was experimental and often home built.
The first radio transmitters used a loud spark gap to generate radio waves, and so we're
often housed in a separate outbuilding or shed.
When radio was first adopted by the US Navy, a small wooden structure placed on deck to
house the ship's radio equipment became known as the Radio Shack.
Say a radio shack can be anywhere that radio equipment is housed and operated, usually
a room, such as with amateur radio stations, or for some, the entire shack may consist
of a handheld radio, or two, while others may operate mobile equipment in a vehicle.
An amateur radio used the room housing the equipment is often called a HAM shack, end
of quote.
It's actually a pretty good definition, I think, if somebody has a more complete or
better definition or where that term originates, I'd be interested to hear it.
So that actually kind of brings me to the next point.
I sort of divide amateur radio gear into three categories, or I guess maybe four.
There is portable equipment, which is equipment that is designed to be handheld devices,
and it's designed to be able to carry, thus being portable.
Then you have mobile equipment that's designed to be used in a vehicle.
It doesn't have to be used in a vehicle, but it's designed to be optimized for mounting
in a vehicle of some sort.
Then you have base station gear, which is equipment that's used in a more fixed station
environment.
Then I guess a fourth category would just sort of be miscellaneous stuff that can kind
of cross the boundaries.
So I have some equipment that falls into all of those categories, and I'm just going
to talk about what I have and what I use kind of category by category.
To start out with, portable operations.
I have two handheld radios.
Some people might refer to them as a walkie talkie.
In amateur radio, we tend to call them handy talkies.
I'm not exactly sure where that came from.
The first one that I got was quite a number of years ago.
Probably I'm going to guess around the 2010 timeframe give or take.
It's in a Linko DJ 190 handy talkie, and I purchased it off of eBay.
It was used.
I think I paid around $50 for it.
At the time, all I had was a mobile rig that I was using as a base station, and I'll
actually talk about that after a while.
I didn't really think I had that much need for a handheld portable radio, but I thought
it'd be good to have one.
I didn't want to spend a lot of money, and so that's what I did.
This radio is strictly a two meter radio.
It works only in the two meter band, which is inside of the VHF section of the spectrum.
Two meter is a very popular ham radio band.
We use it for local communications, either radio to radio or radio through, radio to radio
through repeater, and two meters very popular for that.
It has just five watts of maximum output power, which is typical of a handheld type of
radio.
The power source is four AA batteries that go into a pack.
I believe they also made a rechargeable battery pack for this model radio, but I don't
have that.
You can also connect it to an external 12 volt power supply, so you can connect it to
the 12 volts in your automobile if you want to or something to that effect.
It's a decent radio.
It actually transmits and receives quite well.
It's a very simplistic in design.
It has no numeric keypad on it, like most handhelds do today, so programming it can be a
little bit interesting.
It basically has a knob at the top that you use to select frequencies and things, and
then just like several buttons.
By doing various combinations of key presses and knob turning, you can program it.
You can save frequencies in memory, and so it's certainly usable.
I don't really use it too much anymore because I've replaced it, but it's a nice backup
2 meter handheld radio to have around.
So more recently, I purchased, again, used, this time it was at a ham fest, a Yazoo VX
6R.
The reason I did that is I got to thinking that even though I don't use portable radios
that much, it would be nice to have one that not only operated in the 2 meter band, but
also the 70 centimeter band, which is the UHF portion of the spectrum, because 70 centimeter
is also a very popular band for local communications, and I was finding more and more often that
I just kind of wished I had one for UHF as well.
So that's kind of why I purchased it.
I paid about $75 US dollars for it.
Like I say, it operates in the 2 meter band.
It operates in the 70 centimeter band, and it also operates in the 1 and a quarter meter
band, which is otherwise known as the 220 megahertz band.
So it's a kind of, you know, a little bit more featureful there.
It still just produces 5 watts of output on both 2 meters and 70 centimeters, only a
1 and a quarter, or no 1 and a half on the 1 and a quarter meter.
It does have a nickel metal hydride rechargeable battery, so that's kind of nice.
It's a rugged design.
In fact, it's even rated to be minimally submerged for relatively short periods of time.
Not that I'm going to try that.
But it also does have a wide band receiver on it that includes the normal AM and FM broadcast
bands.
So it's kind of cool.
I don't use it a lot, but it has come in handy in a number of circumstances recently.
Like I said about that, I think just about a year ago.
So that really covers portable operations as far as I'm concerned.
Now, there's way, way more equipment that can be included in portable equipment is just
I just haven't gotten into that personally.
So let's move now to mobile operations.
This is a gear that is, like I said, designed to be operated in a vehicle, but it doesn't
have to be.
I have only one radio that fits this description.
And in fact, it happens to be the very first radio I purchased.
And when I purchased it, I first used it as just a base station radio before putting
it in the car.
And that is the Yezu FT8800 dual band radio.
That's a very popular radio.
It's older now.
I think it's been discontinued, but a lot of people have these.
A lot of people love these radios.
They were very popular.
I purchased it brand new.
I think in about 2009, I'm guessing I paid around $300 for it, US, but I don't remember
if that's accurate or not, but it's somewhere in that area.
It is dual band.
It operates in the 2 meter and 70 centimeter band of the spectrum, both VHF and UHF.
Now it produces a lot more power than a portable 50 watts instead of 5 watts, output
on 2 meter and 35 watts on 70 centimeter.
So as an aside, when I first became a ham, as all new ham do, we deliberate on, well, what
should be our first radio?
What should we get to start this out?
And a lot of people choose a handheld, portable handheld, walkie-talkie type radio, kind
of like either the Alinco that I have or the Yezu that I have, or like the cheap Chinese
ones, the Balfang UV5R radios that Mr. X has been talking to us about, a lot of people
buy those because they're cheap.
When I first became a ham, I talked to a friend of mine and he recommended that I rather
spend the money and buy a mobile rig.
And the reason is, is because it produces a lot more power output and I would get a lot
better results out of it than on a handheld.
And it would be a much better initial experience.
And so I followed that advice and I think I'm happy with that, that I did that and I would
probably offer that as advice to any other new ham.
If you can afford a mobile radio, and they're actually, they're cheaper now than they used
to be, if you can afford a mobile radio, you'll probably be happier than with just a little
handy talkie to start out with.
Now you probably will want a handy talkie at some point, but anyway.
Just a few more about the features of this radio.
One of the things about this particular brand, or this model, the FT8800, is it has dual
independent radios.
It's almost like there's two separate radios in it.
So not only is it dual banned, but it's dual received.
You can select two frequencies at once and listen to them at the same time.
They can either be in the two meter or 70 centimeter band, either one.
So you can have two in the same band or two in separate bands.
Now you can only transmit on one of those at once.
You select which one of those you want to transmit when you hit transmit on when you
hit the push to talk button.
But that offers a lot of really cool ability to be able to monitor different frequencies
and that kind of thing.
Since this is a mobile radio, one of the features it has that a lot of mobile radios have is
it has a detachable control head.
The portion of the radio that has the display and the knobs and buttons and various things,
that can detach from the rest of the radio.
So you can mount the radio someplace out of the way and then with a little special cable
connect it to the control head that you mount on your console someplace.
And in fact that's what I've done in my vehicle.
I have the radio mounted to the floor underneath the passenger seat.
And then I connect to the remote control head that's mounted on the console.
Again since these are intended for mobile use they're typically going to be powered
by 12 volts DC external power source which I have wired up to the battery in my vehicle.
The next thing though that you have to consider with mobile or with anything is what am I going
to do about an antenna.
You want the antenna to be on the outside of the vehicle and a common first step that most
people do is to use a mag mount, a magnetic mount antenna.
So it has a pretty strong magnet that you can stick to the top of your car or the top
of the trunk or whatever works best and then you run the feed line into the inside of
the vehicle usually going through like a door jam or something to that effect.
And I did that for a while and it works but I then decided I wanted a more permanent antenna
mount.
And so I installed what's referred to as an NMO antenna mount which stands I learned
just recently stands for new Motorola mount.
So apparently this was originally designed or invented by Motorola.
To install this mount you actually have to drill a hole in the roof of your car or wherever
you want to put it which takes a little bit of intestinal fortitude to do.
How badly do you want to drill a hole in the top of your car.
And if it was a brand new car I don't know if I would have the guts to do it or not.
In my case it was a used vehicle.
It's kind of an interesting process to do.
In fact if I ever do it again I would probably try to do an HPR episode about it because
I think that might be kind of interesting.
But the advantage is not to mention you have a good solid mount to mount an antenna but
now the feed line is already inside the car so you don't have to run it through a door
jam.
The other thing that's kind of cool about it is that you can then screw on various different
kinds of antennas.
And I actually have two that I use.
I have a Comet B10, B-10 NMO mount or antenna.
It is a short little thing.
It's probably, well I guess it's probably about a half a meter in length I guess because
it is a quarter wavelength on two meters and it is about a half wavelength on 70 centimeters.
It's very short.
It's not a terribly efficient antenna but the reason I use it mostly is because I can
drive into my garage with it on and it doesn't hit the top of the garage door.
So that's kind of my normal antenna that's there and it works okay.
But if I'm going to be out and about doing serious mobile operations for a period of time
I will replace that with a Comet SBB-5 NMO mobile antenna which is half wavelength on
two meters and two and five eighths wavelengths on 70 centimeters.
It's much longer.
It has much better gain, it's more efficient and so I get better reception with that.
So that's my mobile station, pretty much that's it.
I think I mentioned I used this radio initially in the house as a base station but then when
I got another radio I went ahead and put it back out in the car.
So that brings us then to base station operations and that's really what a lot of people
mean when they talk about their ham shack.
They're really talking about your base fix station and a lot of people have a lot more
equipment and they're base station than they do say in their car although that's not
always true.
My base station is fairly simple.
The center piece of it is an Icom 746 Pro radio.
Now this is what would be referred to as an HF radio with VHF as well.
Let me explain what that kind of means.
So I mentioned that for like local communications you're typically using the 2 meter or 70 centimeter
VHF or UHF.
When you want to get into long distance communication you go down into lower frequencies, frequencies
and what we refer to as the HF portion of the spectrum.
And as amateurs we have allocations in quite a few bands inside of that HF section.
They're from the 160 meter to 80 meter, 40 meter, 30 meter, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10.
We have allocations in all of those bands and this radio will work in all of those bands.
It produces a hundred watts of maximum output.
It does all modes, it's referred to as all modes.
So the other radios I talked about already, both the handhelds and the mobile are strictly
FM, frequency modulation radios, which is common for that kind of radio.
When you get into HF you often want to use other modes.
This one will do FM but it also does AM which is amplitude modulation.
It also does single sideband which is probably the most popular voice mode, I should say,
single sideband which is a form of AM actually and then CW which stands for continuous wave
and it's what's used for Morse code communication.
So it'll do all of those things.
I bought this one used, again, off of eBay and at the time I think I paid a little under
a thousand dollars US.
You can get them cheaper now.
It's an older radio.
It was probably new in around the 2000 timeframe, maybe late 90s, something to that effect.
I bought it probably in about 2012, 13, somewhere in that timeframe I believe.
It's a fairly simple radio but yet it's very capable.
It does everything that I have time to do as far as right now as far as HF, long distance
type communications.
Like I say with all radios you do have to consider antennas.
Well first I'll say power source.
The power source on this radio is also 12 volts DC.
So in the house I have to have a source of 12 volt DC power and for that I have an MFJ
number 42 25 MV power supply.
This thing has an adjustable voltage from 9 to 15 volts.
I usually keep it right at the 13.8 volts which is kind of the typical automotive voltage
range.
It will produce up to 25 amps of output.
So that's way more power output than say like a bench top power supply that you would
use for electronics testing or something like that.
You need a fairly high current power supply.
And I actually bought that brand new way back in 2009 with the YeZoo FT8800 when I first
used it as a base station.
I used this power supply on that and it still works just fine.
I use it now on this ICOM 746 Pro.
So now we go to antennas.
I really only have one HF antenna that is currently in use.
And that is a vertical antenna that was made by a local ham.
He kind of designed a set of antennas and he sells them to local people.
He calls this one a Grasshopper 2.
I guess it's the second version.
Like I say it's a vertical antenna.
It sits on the ground and sticks up in the air probably well, probably around 20 meters
high.
It's pretty tall or wait, that might be too tall, but it's pretty tall.
And then it also has wires running out along the ground in eight different directions.
We call those radials.
And we could talk for a long time on how antennas work and how you tune antennas and that
kind of thing.
And that's that subject for another show or another series of shows probably.
The thing about that antenna is that it is a non-resident antenna.
Which again, I'm not going to get into that too much, but what it does mean is that in
order to use it you have to have an antenna tuner device.
While this Icom 746 Pro radio does have a built-in tuner and it does work to some extent.
However, the tuning range of it is a little bit limited and so I really kind of needed
to get an external tuner, a separate tuner.
And I started out by purchasing an MFJ949E, which is a manual antenna tuner.
I think I got that off evade, I believe I did.
It has knobs on it that you have to adjust to tune the antenna.
It works.
It's kind of a pain to use.
And so recently, actually probably my most recent major amateur radio purchase was an
LDG electronics automatic tuner.
It's the AT200 Pro 2 automatic antenna tuner.
I purchased it new at a ham fest here just a few months ago, actually.
What's cool about it is that it has a special cable that works with Icom radios, others
too I think, but I can plug it into this Icom radio and the Icom radio can control
it just as if it was an internal tuner.
And so it really meshes well with this radio, has a much better tuning range and it works
quite well.
I've been pretty happy with it, the little that I've used it since then.
All right, so that's my only base station radio, just that one.
Oh, I should mention that, as I said, in addition to the radio supporting all the HF frequencies,
it also works on the 6 meter band, which is technically in the VHF portion of the spectrum,
but it kind of behaves more like an HF frequency to some extent.
And so it's pretty common that a lot of HF radios will also work in 6 meters, even
though that's not technically HF.
But then this particular one also does work in the 2 meter band.
And so that's what I use in my base station for 2 meter communication.
And the antenna I use for that is an antenna, it's a fiberglass vertical antenna.
I don't remember the brand name, it was sort of an off brand.
Again, I purchased that with the FT8800 back in my initial day one purchase, and I used
it on that radio for a while.
Now I use it on this one.
It's attached to the chimney of my house, and it works well.
And with this 100 watt radio, I can talk to repeaters well in excess of 50 miles away
or more.
It works quite nicely.
So now we get to kind of the more miscellaneous type things.
One of the things that most hamshacks have nowadays is a computer.
And because you use a computer for a lot of things, you can use it for logging, but you
can also use it for what we call digital modes, digital communications, and rig control,
controlling your radios, all kinds of things.
I have a little computer that started out with a mini ATX motherboard that somebody gave
me with a CPU on it, and I bought a case for it, put it in there.
I'm running Zubuntu 1604 on it, I have a little 15 inch LCD monitor.
That's kind of my computer at present, although I'm kind of looking to upgrade that probably.
As I mentioned, we have digital communications.
So digital communications is where you connect a computer to a radio, and you are actually
sending data over the air through that radio.
In order to do that, you need a device that interfaces between the computer and the radio.
And I purchased the West Mountain Rig Blaster Advantage interface.
It has a USB cable on it that goes into the computer, and then you connect it to the radio
through the headphones and microphone jack, basically.
And what's interesting about this one, there's several of them like this, is it actually
has a built-in sound card.
Because the way these digital communications work is you take your data and you turn it
into a series of tones, and those tones get transmitted.
And then on the other side, when you receive those tones, you then convert those tones
back into data.
And so you need a sound interface in order to do that.
And you can use the sound interface that's in your computer, no problem.
But the more advanced interface devices, such as this Rig Blaster, actually has a built-in
sound card.
And so when I plug it into the USB of the computer, it shows up as a second sound card in the computer.
And so then when I'm using the digital communication software, it uses that sound card.
And on the outside, there's some little knobs that you can use to adjust the levels of
the sound, which is very important when dealing with digital communications.
Digital communications is really another whole episode in of itself.
It's one that I might try to do some time, but if somebody beats me to it, by all means
go for it.
I'm no expert in it, but I have dabbled some.
And anyways, that's the device that I have for that kind of thing.
Another device I have that's kind of in the miscellaneous category is an antenna analyzer.
I have the MFJ269C, which is a fairly popular one, on the cheap end of the scale.
When you're building an antenna, you often want to check how that antenna is tuned.
And an antenna analyzer helps with that.
You plug it in, and what it does is it transmits a very, very weak signal.
And then it looks at the signal coming back, and you adjust it for tuning.
Again, I'm not going to get into the details of that at this time, because this episode
would get way too long.
A few other pieces of miscellaneous gear I have that I use is a stereo headphone that has
a microphone on it, and then also a push-to-talk pedal, so that the pedal that you operate with
your foot to operate the push-to-talk.
And those two things together, the headphone and the push-to-talk, or the pedal, gives
you the opportunity to be completely hands-free when you're operating, so that you can write
in your logbook or type on your computer or do whatever else you need to do.
So that's kind of nice.
I just have some cheap ones.
Again, I bought off eBay.
They were new, but I bought them off of eBay.
I have made a few dipole type antennas in my day.
I don't have any of them up right now.
I also have, you know, as all hands over time, we collect all manner of, you know, bits
and pieces of coax, feed line, connectors, adapters, you know, things like that, and I certainly
have my share of that.
Another thing that I guess is miscellaneous or maybe base station that I'm starting to
get into, and I want to more, is I have a little bit of equipment that deals with software
defined radio.
I have one of the RTL-SDR dongles.
I've got some little Raspberry Pis that can be used with that stuff, and some of that
kind of thing.
That's an area I want to learn more about and do more in coming up, which actually is
a good segue to the last little thing here, and that is, you know, there's a temptation
to not do an episode like this until I finish some aspect of my hamshack that is not finished.
The problem is, is a hamshack is never finished.
You never get to that point where you just say, well, this is perfect.
I don't want to add anything more.
I don't want to change anything.
There's always something you want to do different, or add, and so, you know, embrace that.
Don't worry about if your hamshack is not perfect.
What would I like to do in my hamshack?
First of all, I need more antennas.
I've got radio gear here that can access more bands and frequencies than I have antennas
that can do it.
I need to catch up on the antenna front.
I would like to put up some form of a tower sometime, maybe within the next year, that
I can put some antennas on.
I live out in the country outside of town, so I have the room to do it.
I just need to make the time and priority to do that.
I would like to do some work with organizing just the space a little bit better.
Right now, well, my hamshack is in the basement of the house.
I have a room that's on the outside wall in the basement.
There's a counter here that I have that I've got all my stuff setting on, and that's fine.
But I would like to enhance the space with a little bit better power sources.
I'd like to do a better job of grounding.
Grounding is kind of a thing that you don't have to be perfect on that to have a functional
hamshack, but it helps.
So I'd like to get into that.
Like I said, I would like to do more with software defined radio stuff.
I'd like to get into satellite communications a little bit more, which I have most of what
I would need for that.
I just need to get around to doing it.
And then at some point, I probably would like a more modern main base station radio.
This ICOM 746 Pro is getting pretty long in the tooth, but at this point, if I bought
something now, I really couldn't justify it because I wouldn't use the features that
it has that this radio doesn't at this point.
I hope to maybe work into where that would be true.
So that's my hamshack.
It's quite simple.
I guess one of the things I hope by going through this is that I impart the knowledge on those
that are maybe interested in ham radio that you don't have to do anything fancy to have
a functional station.
You don't have to spend a lot of money.
You can buy used stuff.
eBay is a little bit risky because you don't see what you're getting.
If you can find it at a ham fest or something like that, that might be better, but you can
buy used, you can get into it, you can do a lot of things with not that much money today.
And so, if you have an interest in it, go for it and see what you can accomplish.
It's an experimenter's hobby.
You're never going to finish, do everything there is to do.
There's always something new.
So just get into it and go if it's something that interests you.
So that's really all I've got for today.
I hope this hasn't gotten too long and boring.
If there's other hands out there that would do a show and make this a series of what's
in my ham shack, I think that would be awesome.
And also, you know, we'd like to kind of continue this amateur radio roundtable idea.
We've had some interest, but the interest has not been terribly consistent.
So if you're interested in that, say something, make a comment on the email list or something
like that and maybe we can grow that a little bit as well.
So with that, I'm going to sign off.
I hope everybody has a good day and tune in next time to another exciting episode of Hacker
Public Radio.
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