Welcome to the Shack crib!

Happy 2025 everyone!

After a solid year of HF inactivity, I am proud and happy to say that my FT-891 is back on the air in a rather permanent matter! The minute our basement was finished up (and I discovered, despite being old, our house is properly grounded!!! Hooray!!!), I began brainstorming ideas on how to build my HF station in the lower dwellings of my house.

Back to the Basement

First and foremost, here are some reasons I chose the basement:

• Safe spot - In the Midwest, we are prone to all sorts of severe weather - ice storms, tornadoes, hail storms - you name it. Putting the ham station upstairs is just a recipe for catastrophe and a major loss. The basement provides the best shelter from all of these storms and can ensure that I, too, am relatively safe.

• Close to ground - Grounding will no longer be an issue. The ground rod is directly outside of my station and I can arrest my antenna's static buildup VERY close to the ground - about a foot or two between the coax surge protector and the ground rod.

• Easy routing - No more building window passthroughs! We have a wall to the east that can provide easy coax access via a bulkhead connector.

My workbench isn't too far away either, which means that I can work on radios just around the corner. Plus it's warm in the winter and cool enough in the summer!

My entire setup is built around a heavy-duty shelving unit that gives me lots of storage for any and all systems that I utilize. I have transformed it into a desk-like application which is both comfortable and compact.

Computerization

My family updated our home's computer with a more modern machine, so as a result, I got the old computer and put Windows 10 on it! I also upgraded the RAM from 1GB to the max of 4GB. The hard drive was also updated from 160GB to 512GB, though I opted to keep the drive as an HDD. It does have a DVD/CD player and runs REALLY fast! 

Software on my machine includes: WSJT-X, FLDigi, FLRig, Winlink Express, Direwolf for APRS/Packet, and so much more!!!

RFI Mitigation

Mitigating RF has proven to be difficult for me but I hope I've gotten the hang of it. Along my coax in the house, I'm running generic snap-on ferrite beads and I've grounded my antenna setup with surge/lightning protection. I also have snap-ons on my audio lines and USB cables. I should be far away from the GFCI outlet I keep tripping too, but I feel that I need to change it to one with greater RFI protection. Remember - cheap isn't always the answer!

In all of this, I may have found my answer: Since I'm using an end-fed antenna, common mode currents start to become a problem, since the coax shield is a part of the counterpoise system despite using a separate counterpoise wire. This is why the outlet would trip on almost all the HF bands I used. Despite being on lower power, only 5 watts, the current along the coax is somewhere around 300mA. GFCIs trip at anywhere between 4 and 6mA. No wonder I couldn't get it under control!

I planned on purchasing a 1:1 choke if problems persisted - to my relief, I found this wasn't necessary! My RF problems were beyond cured!!!

Antenna

As I described previously, I'm using my end-fed random wire that I had in my room. I did end up extending the wire from about 33' to 71'. This gives me insurance that it will work flawlessly on 80 through 10 meters without any SWR issues. The counterpoise is a 29' piece of the same type of wire.

The antenna wire comes from a 100' spool of 14AWG stranded copper wire from Amazon. This is guaranteed to work well over 100 watts, and it's black, so it should blend in with my surroundings. I chose stranded due to its flexibility and durability. The wire is sloped from the transformer which is hoisted into a tree about 15 or 20 feet above ground via a pulley and rope. The hoisted transformer ensures that I can pull the antenna down for things such as maintenance or when I need to go QRT for stormy weather or for the night. In addition, I have added a carabiner clip if I want to try different antennas, such as an EFHW or my Chameleon antenna.

While I'm at it, have a look at this calculator here: https://k7mem.com/Ant_End_Fed.html?M40=40#Not_Random_Multi. This is a nifty little calculator I found a few months ago that will tell you what bands you can use with a length of wire you give it. You want to avoid the red spots - look for spots that are not filled in. If your green line falls in an area that's not shaded with red, then it is good to use on the bands you've selected. Come to think of it, the smallest length I can use for my TS-660 (15/12/10/6) is around 13 feet, which means all this time I used it I had too much wire!!!

So yes - I am back! And boy does it feel good to be back too...