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Details of the W4TI
Station: Things have changed a bit since the current QSL card was printed. The TS-830S and accessories were sold on E-Bay, and were replaced by a Yaesu FT-1000MP Field. The TS-830S was a great radio, but after 20 years, it was time for an upgrade. Furthermore, in December of 2002 we moved from Huntsville to Guntersville, Alabama, and so there is an entire new building. The room was turned from a dingy rental apartment living room into a perfectly splendid ham shack.  Figure 1. This is the operating position at W4TI as of December 2003. On HF, I operate almost entirely on CW, and also a bit of PSK31. I bought a microphone when I got the FT-1000MP Field, but it usually sits exactly where it is shown, hooked up and out of the way. The computer shown is running Linux. All the computers here run Linux. The MFJ Tuner is useful for making the 135 foot flattop work well on 10 and 7 MHz, as the tuner in the Yaesu won't handle that much of a mismatch. The VHF radios cover 144 and 440 MHz.  Figure 2. This is a wider picture of the W4TI operating room. On the right are my two main Linux development systems, which both feed the huge Sun monitor (bought cheap, on E-Bay). They are used for hardware and software development. On the left, next to the printer, in an old wooden card filing cabinet, which is set up to hold cards exactly the size of QSL cards. There is no excuse for losing cards now.  Figure 3. This is the shop area in the W4TI operating room. Looking the other direction there are the development systems shown above, plus the electronics workbench with the oscilloscope and logic analyzer (bought cheap, on E-Bay) and beyond that is the monitor hooked up to the Sun Ultra 5 workstations (bought cheap on E-Bay, and also running Linux) seen under the table, and the lonely Windows 2000 box sitting next to them. Yes, there are a couple of programs (such as those for Altera and Lattice CPLD and FPGA development) which require Windows, and so there is one system with a bought and paid for Windows 2000 license. The computer on the left is shown running SuSE 9.0 Linux, and the main program you can see is Eagle. This is a perfectly fabulous schematic and printed circuit development program which runs under Linux. See http://www.cadsoft.de/ I do both hardware and software development in my consulting business. You can see some of my designs at http://www.freeio.org/ . The two felt reindeer shown are Meteor and Valentine, the shop mascots. Why were the names Meteor and Valentine chosen? Well, because Comet and Cupid were already taken, of course. |