Well, November is nearly in the bag!  In the spirit of thanksgiving, I've been most thankful for the health of my 3 little ones, my wife, and the rest of my family.  In addition, we are privileged enough that I really have to be thankful for everything - I've got no room to complain about anything, when considering the alternatives!

     Among my privileges, are the fact that I get to go to work every day, and earn enough that with some patience, time, savings, and my own labor, I can keep plugging away on building my new ham shack.  The room itself is done, so now I've been shifting gears towards the radio infrastructure.  I left myself a big service area behind the operating position, so that's one of the things I have worked on in the last couple weeks.  When I last left you the space back there looked pretty much like this:

     Since then, I've put insulation in the wall (to keep it from sounding like a drum when I thump on my desk) and attached plywood to the backside.  All the room electrical is in the wall, and all the shack electric will be done surface-mount in conduit, to accommodate changes updates etc. as the radio part of the shack takes shape and changes in the future.

     In case you are curious, the wires coming through the wall in the third picture are some temporary cords for things that are on the shelf in the ham shack - the first is a light, and the second is the small coax for a cellular antenna - my shack is basically a concrete bunker, so I had to put in an external antenna and a little booster-amplifier to bring cell signal down into the space.
     Another thing worth pointing out - in the first picture above you might notice the large junction box.  Inside that box is all of the AC circuits that will eventually be for shack stuff, coming from the breaker panel above it.  This way, as I add equipment, I can run conduit from this box, to wherever I need it, to get the circuits where they need to go.

     More recently, I've been working on getting my computer monitors for the operating position mounted, but in the interest of time, I'll save that update for another post.  Feel free to check out my twitter and instagram if you want to see some sneak peaks of that!

     Shhhhh....don't tell, but there's something I'm having more fun doing than radio....hanging out with my family and our new baby!

     The good news is, I still really like ham radio, and have kept plugging away at my shack project, work on the POTA database, and getting on the air,  in little bits and pieces as I have time.  The shack stuff has mostly been details, the most visible of which is the "splashguard" boards around the desk.  

As I was measuring, cutting, and test fitting those boards, I did find a spot in the wall that has a bit of a bulge, which meant I had to make one of my otherwise solid boards, "bendy":

Luckily it turned out well, and things look a lot cleaner, and more "finished" now that they are in place.  In classic "Where's Waldo" style, look for the following things in the picture below, that are the "details" I've been working on.

• "Splashguards" installed
• Additional sound-deadening installed
• Corner trim
• Callsign Plaque made by W8ZST
• UTC clock installed
• FCC License displayed, in super fancy fashion
• Tension wire stretched near the ceiling, behind the operating position
  • I work from home, so when I'm on video calls I can pull curtains across behind myself to "hide" the rest of the room when I'm on display :-)

     The other fun detail was some little tid-bits I ordered for my giant map.  I wanted to be able to "pin" states, provinces, and countries as I contacted them, but the map is actually hanging using poster clip rails.  I ordered some map magnets, and a whole bunch of super tiny magnets, so that I could just put one of the tiny magnets behind the map, the map magnet in front, and then slide them into position.

If you want to do something similar, most of this stuff can be grabbed from Amazon:

• Map Magnets
• Tiny Magnets
• Giant Map​