Station

Since May, 2023 I've been experimenting with various setups in my full-time RV station, an Airstream Flying Cloud 23FBT. The latest radio upgrade is a Yaesu FT-710 HF/50MHz SDR transceiver paired with a Yaesu ATAS-120A auto-tuning antenna as the primary setup, with a Yaesu FT-991A as a backup. Since the Airstream behaves like a one-piece aluminum twinkie electrically, the body skin makes a nice 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. Power is provided through shore power or the 400Ah of lithium batteries and 500 watts of solar om board. 

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 (not currently in use)

Alinco DR-135T for an APRS digipeater (not currently in use)

Antennas 

Yaesu ASAT-120A

Comet CA-2X4SRNMO dual-broadband

Barker & Williamson BWD-90 broadband folded dipole, 1.8 to 30 MHz (not currently in use)

Comet GP-3 dual band 2m / 70cm vertical on a 10' mast (not currently in use)

Current setup in the Airstream

Mobile and HT

Yaesu FTM-400XDR

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

Yaesu FT-3D with a Diamond SRH519 antenna

Yaesu FT-70D with a Diamond SRH519 antenna

Computers

HP ProDesk 600 G3 Micro, Quad Core i5-7500T running Linux Mint 21.3, my primary desktop.

HP ProDesk 600 G3 Micro, Quad Core i5-7500T running Windows 10 Pro

Dell XPS laptop running Ubuntu 24.04

Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, Raspberry Pi 64 bit OS, RPi M.2 HAT with 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD 2242 PCIe

Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB, Raspberry Pi 64 bit OS, USB boot 120GB SSD

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 can be connected via Barrier software, so only one keyboard and mouse is needed. Nice!

Previous station configuration at our Lake Michigan home