This page is very much a WIP right now.
I currently don’t have the antennas or power cords to actually use all of these concurrently. (There’s a RigRunner set of Powerpole connectors behind this.) But these were previously in a huge mess on my desk.
Workbench is half of a 24×48″ metal shelf, with a pine top. (The other half is my basement workbench.)
The wooden enclosure is from gearhive on Etsy, and so far I’m happy about it.
On the left side, two blank 1U panels (room for future expansion!), and then the bottom unit is a 2U mount from Northcomm. They use Jotto Desk plates to accommodate all sorts of stuff. In my case, it’s a BCD536HP scanner, with a 403-470 MHz CDM1550 to its right. That radio’s made fairly redundant by the others, and was an Allstar project that never got off the ground.
On right, two 2U panels from Alberta Radio Supply. At top, an NX-5800 for 450-520 MHz, and an NX-5700 for 136-174 MHz, both set up for P25 and DMR. I really love that they’ve replaced separate P25 and DMR radios. I’ve been intending to get these mounted in my truck, but that hasn’t come to fruition yet. I’m otherwise tempted to run these into a diplexer and run them to a dual-bander in the attic.
The bottom two radios are XTL1500s. The one on the left covers 900 MHz, and is connected to a Diamond BC920 in the attic. (Just below it, in the center below the rack, is the old GTX it’s replacing.) The right XTL1500 is another S-split radio, part of a too-good-to-pass-up lot. I’m mostly using it for monitoring Boston Fire and a few other prolific users of MDC1200, because the Kenwoods don’t do a good job of muting MDC1200. I’d rather replace it with an XTL5000, but mine has a weird audio issue. This radio has a Yagi in the attic pointed into Boston.
Not pictured:
- A Syntor X9000 on lowband. I’d like to get this set up on 6 meters. There’s already a Comet GP-15 in the attic I can run it to. (I was using a Yaesu FT-847 for this, but gave it to my dad recently. The HF noise floor in my condo makes things unusable here.)
- A Kenwood TM-742 tribander, which I bought for 220 MHz coverage. Finding a mount for that is tricky, and I also need an attic-friendly 220 MHz antenna. (I had it on a discone briefly, but performance was very poor.)
(Bencher keyer on top is to shame me into learning CW, I guess…)
Radio and Antenna Information
(I’m kind of building this out for my own information, TBH.)
- Motorola CDM1550LS (UHF), on a Laird YF450112 Yagi pointed into Boston
- Kenwood NX-5700 and NX-5800, on a Comet GP-15
- Motorola XTL1500, one on 900 MHZ and one on 450-520
- Motorola GTX (900 MHz), on a Diamond BC920 antenna
- Uniden BCD536HP scanner