Station

The new Yaesu FT-710 AESS SDR transceiver has replaced the FT-991A in the camper shack

Living in a third floor condominium presents some significant challenges to setting up a home station as compared to having your own home, some land, and a tower. Given this, I've found a camper-based HF station is a great alternative to having no station at all. Since January, 2022 I have been reading and experimenting with various setups for my Intech Flyer Chase camper. 

In the latest upgrade to the camper shack, the Yaesu FT-991A was replaced with a new model Yaesu FT-710 HF/50MHz SDR transceiver paired with a Yaesu ATAS-120A auto-tuning antenna. The camper has a one-piece aluminum roof, aluminum frame, and aluminum sides, allowing for a good ground plane for 20 meters and up. It has some difficulty tuning on 40 meters, so I will have to work on that, but overall, this setup has been working quite well. 

Transceivers

Yaesu FT-710 HF/50MHz SDR

Yaesu FT-991A HF/6/2/440 all modes

Yaesu FTM-7250D dual band FM/C4FM

Yaesu FT-7800 and FT-7900 dual-band home-brew repeater

Alinco DR-135T for an APRS digipeater

Antennas 

Yaesu ASAT-120A

Comet CA-2X4SRNMO dual-broadband

Barker & Williamson BWD-90 broadband folded dipole, 1.8 to 30 MHz

Comet GP-6 dual band 2m / 70cm vertical on a 10' mast

Mobile and HT

Yaesu FTM-400XDR

This mobile gets the most use of any of my radios. While driving around in the Colorado ZR2, band A is usually on the state-wide WE9COM repeater system in Wisconsin with APRS always running on band B. Outside of Wisconsin, band A is on 146.520, and local repeaters at each destination.

Yaesu FT-3D and Diamond SRH519 antenna

Yaesu FT-70D and Diamond SRH519 antenna

Computers

HP ProDesk 600 G3 Micro, Quad Core i5-7500T running Linux Mint 21 for CQRlog and radio control, RTL-SDR, and experiments

HP ProDesk 600 G3 Micro, Quad Core i5-7500T running Windows 10 Pro for RT Systems radio programming, Nextion programming, and GoPro video editing

Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, Raspberry Pi 64 bit OS, USB boot 120GB SSD, for CQRlof and radio control, experiments

Asus C213S Chromebook also running some Linux software, but on it's way out

Software

The Linux HP ProDesk is used for everything from logging and radio control, to digital HF modes and almost everything I do, with the Raspberry Pi as a backup. Ham-specific software includes CQRlog, CubicSDR, FreeDV, Gpredict, QSSTV, and WSJTX. There are a few other infrequently used programs as well. All three systems are connected via Barrier software, so only one keyboard and mouse is needed. Nice!

Previous home station config (2021)