The "Ham Shack"

The "ham shack" is what amateur radio operators call their station. It is usually not a shack, and often includes more than one actual operating position. My ham shack actually has 5 separate operating positions used for different purposes.

To the right is my main "station", or operating position. On the lower shelf to the left is a Ten Tec Omni VI all band transceiver. On the right is a vintage Kenwood TS-530S tube transceiver from the 1970's. 



The Main Station



The Shortwave Station
In the center are three different home-built QRP transceivers for 40 and 20 meters. On the top shelf from the left is a 6 meter transceiver, MFJ 944 antenna tuner (which in no way "tunes" an antenna), a Daiwa power/SWR meter, an Icom 2100 2 meter transceiver, an electronic keyer, and finally, two clocks. One clock is set for world-wide UTC time, also know as Greenwich Mean Time, and the other is set for local, mountain standard time.

This station has been used to make contacts with other operators in all 50 states, and about 100 different countries world wide.
The shortwave operating position seen above consists of a Hammarlund HQ-160 built in the 1950's, seen on the right, and a Hallicrafters S-38 built in 1946. Although radios built today have many more operating conveniences, they often do not receive much better than radios built 50 years ago. From the 1940's to the 1970's, shortwave radios and ham radios were built by many American companies, including Hammarlund, Hallicrafters, National, Drake, Swan, Galaxy, WRL, and many others. With the shift from tube technology to solid state technology in the 1970's, and the shift in manufacturing to the Orient, most of the old American companies dissappeared. The old equipment is kept operating today by a few vintage radio fans.



W1AW

Probably the most well know ham shack in the world, W1AW is the station of the American Radio Relay League.

By 1914, there were thousands of Amateur Radio operators--hams--in the United States. Hiram Percy Maxim, a leading Hartford, Connecticut, inventor and industrialist saw the need for an organization to band together this fledgling group of radio experimenters. In May 1914 he founded the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) to meet that need.


The "Vintage" Station



To the left, you see my vintage station. It is not much of a station yet, and currently has a Heathkit HW-12A on the top shelf. The bottom shelf contains an HW-32A. The 12A is a single band transceiver operating at frequencies between 3.800 and 4.000 megahertz (mhz). These frequencies are in the amateur 80 meter band. The 32A operates on the 20 meter band. Both of these radios are single sideband (SSB) only. SSB is a voice mode, opposed to CW which is the morse code mode.