The good news: The new shack is coming together, slowly. The equipment is in place and largely cabled,, though I do have a lot of cleanup and organizing to to on the cabling. Right now it’s a rat’s nest behind the equipment and the desk, which I really want to avoid. However, I’ve done some listening and moved a few things around to improve the work flow for the different rigs. I think if this as three separate stations; the FT-1000, the SB-101, and the HW-16. Three operating positions, in different parts of the desk, with different goals.
I also fired up the HW-16 and tested it on 80, 40, and 15 meters. Reverse Beacon Network spotting stations heard me on all three bands, so that’s good.
The bad news: The fancy monitor mount is kind of a piece of crap. Whoever designed it made an incomprehensible decision to use unequal length sections of the arm that raises and lowers the monitors. Since the two arms and their end links/pivots are not parallel, any time you move the monitors the cross bar tilts so the monitors are not level in any position but one. Their response: “Oh, we designed it to be viewed from one place, but you can adjust the arm to level them”. OK, but the monitor attachments won’t hold adjustment either, so every time you move the monitors at all it turns into a circus act of adjustments to get them more or less level. I’m pretty sure I’m going to return it.
I also bought two new 4K monitors from Costco. They arrived today, yippee! Unfortunately, one had a broken seal on the box, a missing power cord, and a cracked screen. Wonderful.