Messy shacks are the way we do things around here.

Foundations of Amateur Radio

In my time as a member of the radio community I've been in around 30 different shacks and a similar amount of camp-out style activations. I've operated at least a hundred different radio set-ups with different operating styles, logging systems and power sources. I wouldn't say that I was particularly experienced, but I've seen enough to make some observations.

My first observation is that radio shacks and set-ups tend to be messy. It's not unusual to see several radios, antenna tuners, amplifiers, switches, computers, power supplies, soldering iron and accumulated cruft in the form of resistors, wires, spare antennas, connectors, screws, knobs and globs of solder, all vying for space on the same bench at the same time.

I'm looking at my own desk right now and I can count a hundred different objects within 60 seconds with no effort what-so-ever, and that's on a desk that's barely larger than a square meter in size. I'm not particularly messy in the scheme of things. There's no food on this desk - other than the cup of coffee I've just made and there's no globs of solder or other sticky things like oil and glue, but still.

One of my friends remarked the other day that no matter how much space we have, we always seem to run out. He wondered why. At the time, my reply was something along the lines of: "Well, it's for the same reason as your bank-account never has enough money in it."

While that observation is probably valid, I'd like to point out some side effects of a messy desk.

If your intent is to operate the radio and get on air to make noise, there needs to be a working station. You need to be able to test it without having to move stuff around and fault finding needs to be part of the way the thing is set-up.

One station I visited had solved this problem by moving their operating station away from the wall so they had two access points. The front where you operate the station and the back where you test it. That way you get to have your cake and eat it too. The set-up worked really well.

Picture a few racks with gear, an operating desk arranged in an L-shape, but moved away from the wall, rather than pushed into the corner. Space limitations prevented you from walking all the way around it, but you could get to all but one side of one rack.

All this was arranged into the space of a standard spare bedroom, pretty much the same as most shack's I've visited. I find myself looking around my own environment with this front-and-rear idea in mind and I'm having a think about how I might apply it.

Another observation is that we never ever throw anything away, ever. I have seen antenna projects that were doomed to fail from day one, spare screws, bits of wood, drawers and drawers of random electronic components, bits of wire, cut-off connectors, damaged bits of coax, half-wound baluns, empty tubes of silicone, failed micro-switches, bent wave guides, broken windings, arced air-gap capacitors, empty boxes, plastic bags, old radio magazines, all waiting for the day that they become useful, likely never.

I'm not saying that this cruft is never useful. I'm saying that the chances of them being useful is inversely proportional to the amount. That means, the more junk you have, the less useful it is. Perhaps culling is a way to increase the usefulness of what's left. The ultimate example of something like this is a Go-Cart wheel bearing that I have lying on my desk. It's a piece of precision engineering, but it's stuffed. It has completed it's useful service life, was discarded in the dirt and I picked it up, cleaned it, oiled it and now it sits on my desk. It looks great, feels nice to play with, but as objects go, it's one of the least useful items on my desk, otherwise filled with paper, computer gear and radio gear.

I just made the bold step to toss it in the bin. Not yet sure how I feel about it, but I'll try by saying that it's the beginning of making the remaining cruft on my desk more useful.

Perhaps our communal messiness is a thing to do with amateur radio as a hobby, or perhaps we have more than our share of messy members of society. The very nature of our hobby is that we test and trial things whilst doing on-air stuff like making contacts and chatting with friends. Perhaps we should arrange our work-spaces to match.

If you've found a way to make it work for you, please feel free let me know and perhaps send me a picture or two.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB