Shack bling

Looks like I am out of action for a few days. We noticed a bulge in the kitchen ceiling which is directly under the shack. There are two pipes that run across under the floor for hot and cold water to the taps and down from the hot water cylinder to the rest of the house. Yes, you guessed it, right under my desk. So, all the radios, screens, Mac and PCs, audio stuff and all cabling out and desk out. On lifting the carpet the floorboard I needed to lift ran right across the room, and right under the test bench! So, all the equipment had to move, including the allegedly portable spectrum analyser and the teleprinter. Fortunately GB7RVB and all the network gear is on shelving attached to the wall so that can stay. And there is was, one leaking lead to copper joint. Far too late to go and get the bits to fix it… and searching for the parts by smartphone is not amusing. Grumble.

It's surprising just how many things one gathers that need Ethernet. Having just made an NTP server out of a Raspberry Pi that took the last port in my 8+2 port PoE switch I needed more ports. The switch is a Netgear GS110TP, 8 Ethernet ports and up to two SFP modules for interlinking. So I have added a second GS110TP linked to the original one via a short fibre lead and two SFP transceivers. The house now has 4 Ethernet switches, all Netgear, making 48 Ethernet ports in total but not all in use, plus 3 wifi access points, Netgear again and all PoE powered. Actually I could have settled for a non-PoE switch as the additional one but this one came cheap, and new in box. All the switches and access points do SNMP too, centrally monitored using MRTG. Why? Because they can!

I have, more or less finished the shack reorganisation which took 4 days! There are still some audio leads to sort out and I plan to do some woodwork to mount the two HF transceivers together. But here it is... It does surprise me how I created space out of the previous mess of wires. Now the radios and PCs are all in reach of each other, test gear is all in one place, and the Creed 75 teleprinter has joined the shack (pity it is not yet working...) Of the 4 screens, the top two are on a Linux PC, the bottom left is Windows 10 and the bottom right is on a Mac mini. A bit of very useful software called 'barrier' allows theMac keyboard, mouse and trackpad to control all three systems. All audio is connected through a mixer (or will be once I add a couple more leads) which also provides inputs to the computers. Now to mess it all up again... how long do you think?