After making it through all the suggestions for you, I see
someone finally recommended the ring ground .... good. That
leaves me with one (or two) recommendation:
Depending on how robust your shack is to become, remember
that you will always need access BEHIND the equipment. In
my shack I left a minimum of 24" behind the equipment and
ran all interconnection wiring between rigs, amps, patch
panel, switches, computer, TU, etc., in Panduit .. the best
stuff ever invented. I would normally suggest to bring your
coaxial lines into the house via a grounded bulkhead, and
your control lines via a protection block, but being in the
basement could put some limitations on this.
Hence .. the following would take care of all of the above.
The wall of your shack that is parallel to the basement wall
should be a "fake" wall, allowing a 3ft deep room behind the
shack wall. Within this room you take care of the entrances
of the coaxial lines and control lines, etc., providing the
proper grounding and protection for these lines. The other
side of this room will give you access to the rear of your
operating position .. all the cabling et al beween rigs and
whatever else. This would keep this "mess" nearly
completely invisible inside the shack.
Well, knew I couldn't stop at just one .. I just built a new
24x36 building for my shack (and one car garage slot) a
couple years ago, hence this is fresh on my mind. Some of
this is "standard stuff", some not.
1) you can never ever ever have too many outlets, never
2) place plenty of conduit in the walls of the shack even if
you can't imagine what you'd ever need them for ... running
coax, control wires, data wiring et al in the future are a
lot easier if you can take them via conduit rather than
across a wall. All my "dead" conduits go to the attic so I
can run anything from anywhere to anywhere else completely
hidden. These "dead" conduits can merely terminate in
covered electrical boxes until the time comes to use them.
3) it may be advantageous to put in electrical cutoff
switches to completely isolate expensiive equipment or test
equipment during some of the nastier storms.
4) don't think in terms of "desktops" or "consoles" but
think in terms of how you operate .. modes, et al, and build
the shack based on those ergonomics. (E.g., the
"centerpiece" of my V-shaped "console" is an aluminum
standard 19" rack that contains monitors, keyboards, some
switching controls, etc. The PC tends to control the rigs
and they are on my left and my right when I do need to touch
them. Things that need less "touching" .. amps, rf
switching, etc., are in other racks external to the V but
within reach. There isn't much "desktop" but the only thing
on the "desktop" is the trackball and paddles .. the mic is
on a boom) This may not be as "pretty" as a nice oak
operating position, but sure works a lot better!
Good luck .. new shacks can be lots of fun to design and
build.
Oh, with all that room, don't settle for a multi-band yagi
and trap dipoles .. my goodness, but up some REAL
antennas!!!!!!
73 de Chuck
waØroi
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