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| Micro-Shack desk in all of its glory, just before I started packing |
My wife has been assigned to a new church, so we leave Floyd County and go half-way across the state to the new church in Walton county. The good news is that the new church is just a few miles from my Gwinnett County QTH -- so I'll be able to spend more time there.
For now, though, I wanted to reminisce about this tiny little room where I spent many hours enjoying my hobby. It's hard to get a picture of the place -- camera angles are difficult in such a tiny room. The view above shows a clutter of equipment on the shelves, as well as other electronic debris at the periphery of the very tiny desk. To the right is the storage room door that swings outward (because there's no room to swing inward), to the left a window, and behind me, water heaters, electrical breaker boxes, and a miscellaneous pile of tools on a cheap plastic shelf unit.
In other words, it's a cluttered but well-loved and well-used space.
The operating desk is just 29 inches off the floor. I found this to be the perfect height. At the Gwinnett County shack, the operating desk is a 30-inch door sitting on top of a couple of filing cabinets. It's too high (about 31") and makes for uncomfortable operating. I'm seriously thinking about building support legs for the door and moving the filing cabinets elsewhere.
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| Micro-Shack just after construction, before I brought in a bunch of stuff. Note the nice stack of shelves. Plenty of room for just about anything. The desk and shelves will stay with the parsonage. |
I build several projects on that desk - several antenna traps, the K1EL K12 keyer, rebuilt the Mini-MOS keyer, as well as a couple of other projects I have not written up yet.
The antenna setup out here in Floyd County has been extremely modest: R7000, 80/40m Trap Dipole, 160/80/40m Trap Inverted-L, and a 6m Dipole.
To be honest, the R7000, despite the rebuild and the ground-mounted radial wires, has pretty much been a waste of time. This antenna never did perform well at the Gwinnett QTH, and while it is better than no antenna, it couldn't hold a candle to the wire antennas in the trees. I don't plan to put it back up, I'll probably sell it off.
The 80/40m Trap Dipole, despite being at a modest height of roughly 10m has done extremely well, especially on 40m. On 80m, I did have some trouble with a weird fundamental overload of the Acer laptop keyboard -- transmitting on 80m would cause the Acer not to accept keystrokes for a short time afterwards.
The 160/80/40m antenna has been the sweetest deal out here in Floyd County. With 1500 feet of radials, it's reasonably efficient, and has worked well even as a random vertical on the other bands. I made my first 6m contacts on this antenna.
I haven't written about the 6m dipole antenna, because there's not much to talk about. It's just a simple dipole made with junk wire hanging in the trees at about 3m high. When 6m is open, it works!
In this tiny room, I've done a ton of operating. Contests - CQWW CW (3), ARRL 10m (3), RTTY Round Up (4), NAQP CW (3), NAQP Phone (4), NAQP RTTY (3), WPX Phone (2), Georgia QSO Party (3), ARRL Field Day (2), IARU (2), CQWW RTTY (3), Sweepstakes Phone (2), ARRL 160m, Stew Perry (3), VHF Sweeps (2), ARRL DX CW (3), ARRL DX Phone, WPX CW, VHF QSO Party, CQWW Phone (2), Sweepstakes CW, ARRL 160m (2), CQ 160m CW, CQ 160m Phone. Some of them were just a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, perhaps a handful of contacts but there were several I set a new personal best score: George QSO Party, ARRL 160m, SS CW, Stew Perry.
Estimating from my logs, I have made over twelve thousand QSOs from this quiet little room.
Being more than 25 miles from Gwinnett County, I had to start over for WAS. During my brief three and a half years of operating, in Logbook of the World, I have confirmations for WAS several ways:
- Mixed
- CW
- Phone
- Digital
- 40m
- 30m
- 20m
- Triple-Play
As well as being very close on a few others:
- 160m - 49 (AK)
- 80m - 49 (UT)
- 17m - 47 (AL, KY, SC)
- 15m - 46 (DE, MS, SC, WV)
- 5-band - 230 out of 250
Yes, I have a lot of fond memories of this place. Like pursuing the K1N Expedition. It was so much fun busting pileups with just a wire antennas, or getting up at 4 AM to outsmart the competition.
The Micro-Shack wasn't always the most inviting place. In the wintertime, it could be quite cold. The digital thermometer would sometimes read about 45 degrees F on the coldest days. However, a small space heater would warm things up in a half-hour or so. Summertime was much tougher. When it is hot in Georgia, it is hot. I could open the door and run a floor fan to cool things down a bit -- but in the height of summer, it would just blow hot air around. I don't know how I operated contests such as Field Day or IARU in the heat of the summer.
The Micro-Shack wasn't convenient, either. Feel the call of nature? Well, you have to go out of the storage room and walk to the house. More than once I was outside operating late at night and my family would lock the door. Perhaps they were trying to tell me something. I told my wife the next place should definitely have a shack where you don't have to walk out of doors to get to the operating position.
Small, cluttered, inconvenient, often uncomfortable. That well describes the Micro-Shack. However, I will remember it quite fondly. It allowed me to stay connected to my hobby despite being a hundred miles away from my main QTH.
Farewell, Micro-Shack. You may be gone, but you will not be forgotten.
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