Help us create our forever ham shack — do it right the first time — and we need your help from all the expert Elmers out there.
We’re finally building out our permanent home shack. We are moving from our rental to our new home next month that is ours and we can finally build our dual operator shack. One station will be an Icom 7300 and the other an Icom 7300 MKII. We’ve got most of the layout, grounding plan, and desk setup figured out, but the biggest thing we still need help understanding is how to properly run dual HF stations in the same room without creating RF problems.
Simply put — how do we work band-pass filters? Do we both need one for every band? Does each radio need its own full filter set? Is there a smarter way to structure it? How should this actually be done in a two-operator shack if we want clean signals and protected front ends? Educate me — I want to understand.
We’re trying to avoid bleed-over, front-end overload, and weird digital interference before it ever becomes a problem. We’d rather build this correctly now than chase RF gremlins later.
We also have plenty of land, so antenna separation won’t be an issue. With that in mind, what would you recommend for antenna strategy to help isolation? Two verticals? Vertical and OCFD? Separate wire antennas cut for different bands? Directional for one position? If you were building a dual-op station from scratch with acreage, how would you approach it?
Here’s a picture of our current “shack” squeezed onto a small corner desk in our rental — which is exactly why we want to do this next one right.
Tell us what worked. Tell us what didn’t. Tell us what to avoid.
We truly appreciate the experience in this group and any help or assistance that can be provided.
73,
Jeff – WV1DAD
Sonia – WV1MOM
