Shack-Update 4.3.2011 – HF is coming

Long time no see! I have been extremely busy lately and therefore this blog has been silent for a while. Sorry about that and special thanks to Jaakko about asking me to write again soon 🙂 Btw. I have been thinking should I keep on writing this blog in English or should I turn to Finnish? What do you think? Do I have any english speaking readers at the moment…hands up…anyone? 🙂

Well.. I finally made my mind about HF rig. I pondered long time between Kenwood TS-480SAT and Yaesu FT-450AT. Both are great rigs, portable and good. The thing with Kenwood was remoterig usage. But finally I thought that I prefer Yaesu and work remotely with computer assistance. So I bought an used Yaesu. It is actually like new, as it has been used only as a secondary rig. The guy I bought it from has maybe the GREATEST Hamshack I have ever seen. Boy did he have a great place there. He just had a newly built house and ofcourse all HAM related details were considered already when building. Antenna leads, grounding, switches and all…just great. And the place was up high in the hill + he had a nice +20 meters mast for several beams in the yard… WOW! Should have taken a bunch of pictures, but I was only staring the Yaesu FT-450AT on the table.. 🙂

My friend OH6VM was then kind enough to lend me a power for the rig, as the power I’m looking for my shack is out of stock from the ham shop. Only thing I was missing was antenna. I ordered them and they arrived yesterday. I was supposed to have a W-8010 trap dipole, but it was also out of stock, so I bought the “good ol” Wimo Windom, the 42 meters long beast of that off center fed dipole. Meanwhile I also made an antenna launcer. I actually made 2 prototypes from which the latter was the best (its in the picture). With the first one we tried to shoot OH8JGQ antenna into the tree, but did not succeed. We used the old army “sling shot style” with success…not too high, but in the tree anyway. 🙂 We must later use this new sling there too. So today I’m about to shoot my own antennas in top of the trees in our yard. Lets see how it goes.

Loads of things have been happening. Hope to write you soon again. Maybe I will shoot some video about my shack and introduce it as it is ready. I strongly encourage my Finnish readers to look my video/podcast program called HessunKahvila as it also discusses these matters A LOT 🙂 It’s only available in Finnish, so sorry to all my international friends.