Since I got my amateur radio licence in 2019, I have set up and operated my radio in a small boiler room in the basement. However, this room also serves as a workshop and is therefore crammed full of tools and difficult to keep clean. In winter, it also got quite cold in the unheated basement, so I often operated with a jacket.

I then got a remote station, which consisted of a Hermes Lite 2 and a Hardrock 50 amplifier. I was then able to operate this remotely from my home office. Unfortunately, this also has certain drawbacks, for example, it is difficult to operate an antenna tuner remotely and be 100% sure at all times that you are not working with too high an SWR or that other errors are creeping in. All of this was possible with the aforementioned setup without any major problems. But then suddenly the desire for a larger power amplifier arose.

After some research, I decided to start with an RM Italy HLA 300 power amplifier, which I was able to purchase second-hand at a reasonable price. However, it turned out that this power amplifier requires a lot more attention from the operator on-site. Hooked on the new high output power, I was now banished to the basement again. Then the wish for a conventional station transceiver arose, which I fulfilled with a Yaesu FT-710. With this setup, I was able to achieve some great successes, which, however, were marred by the dreary basement existence. So the only solution to the problem was to move the shack into the living area.

Fortunately, I still had an empty conduit that ran from a cellar room directly to my home office. To reach it with the antenna cable coming from the Delta Loop Antenna, I completely re-routed it and drilled a new 12mm hole in the basement wall. The Ecoflex 10 used for this purpose, which now runs on the opposite side of the house, could even be shortened by 7m during this conversion. Now that the coax was in the home office, all that remained was to set up the new shack.

For this, I initially took a simple IKEA table that was 97cm wide and set it up where the empty conduit ended in the wall. A quick visit to the hardware store resulted in a pinewood board that was also 97cm long and 40cm deep, which I first oiled and then provided with four 15cm long white metal legs.

The current shack equipment on the table consists of the following components:

• 50A 13.8V switching mode power supply
• MFJ-962E manual antenna tuner
• Yaesu FT-710 HF transceiver
• RM Italy HLA-300 Plus power amplifer
• DJ9PK SWR-/Power meter
• bhi passive speaker
• LED stripes beneath the add-on board

I now finally have a comfortable shack in a tempered, dry and clean environment with direct coax cabling for quite a low budget: The Ecoflex 10 was already in use before and was only routed differently, the table was available and could be dispensed with at the previous location and the table top only cost me €25. Actually, I already have everything I need in the shack, now I’ll follow things that I don’t need but might want – such as a shack sign ;)