This is the station that resides at my electronics restoration shop. Of course, it's all vintage gear and truly museum quality. It changes often but this is the most recent incarnation I have an image of. Currently, it doesn't have the Yaesu FT-301 station or the Johnson Viking II-CDC/6n2 transmitters with matching VFO's. These have been replaced with a Clegg Zeus/Interceptor-B pair and a B&W 5100B/51-SB combo. Very soon it will also have a fully restored Gates M-5078 SW AM Transmitter, and a Gates BC-1T Broadcast AM transmitter converted for 160m and 80m. There is an article for the restoration of the smaller Gates here:
Gates M-5078 Restoration. We haven't started the restoration and conversion of the BC-1T yet, but a similar article will follow once we get that project rolling. Here's the image:
The Vintage StationThe antenna systems at this station were a 160m receiving horizontal sky loop laid out in a nearly perfect circle at an elevation of 70' above ground, a 160' inverted-V doublet fed with 12ga. ladderline at 90' above ground at the feedpoint and 65' at the ends. This is tuned by a Johnson Kilowatt Matchbox; a true balanced 3000W PEP tuner. Also 2m and 6m phased horizontal loop pairs for VHF at 75' elevation, one pair of loops for each band.
And yes ... that is a Hewlett-Packard Spectrum Analyzer being used for station monitoring, along with the Yaesu 301 scope (which I still use). Am I concerned about spectral purity? I live in the NIMBY suburbs of New York, so hell yes!
The hard part of vintage stations like this is getting the control, muting and antenna changeover working in such a way that you can use any transmitter and receiver combination. I used a control panel with several industrial relays, the internal antenna chage-over relay in the Johnson Matchbox, and the manual antenna switches to select which transmitter was sent to the Matchbox. Basically, all I had to do was select which transmitter was sent to to the tuner and everything else was automatic. The receivers were connected to muting on the relay board and fed by the horizontal sky-loop via a TMC Antenna Multi-coupler. It's a shame I do not have an image of the relay board, but the TMC can be seen underneath the Johnson Matchbox as well as the transmitter selection and amplifier bypass switching board above.
All coaxial cables are Times Micro. LMR-400. The doublet uses 12ga ladder-line. The station had a very substantial grounding scheme; here is an image of that as it was going in-place. The switching system was not inline at this time but was eventually located just above where this image was taken, on the wall hidden behind the gear..
The grounding being installed.Grounding transition point & the Coax cables.
This was the last station I had at home. Currently I just have the work station.
My Last In-Home Station, circa 2001John, W2WDX
