Station

Temporary desk until the built-in desk and breakfast bar are done

In September of 2026, I moved from full-time Airstream life into a new-to-me home. Thankfully, there was already a small antenna tower next to the house to make use of. After some interior upgrades, there will be a nice built-in desk area with convenient power and connection passages for my radio and computer equipment, all on the other side of the wall from the tower. The VHF/UHF radios are temporarily set up, but the HF radio and antenna will have to wait until some landscaping is done, so I don't have to set things up twice.

Mobile Station

Life in the Airstream set up near Tucson, Arizona

From May, 2023 to September, 2025 I experimented with various setups in my mobile station, an Airstream Flying Cloud 23FBT. The latest radio upgrade was a Yaesu FT-710AESS HF/50MHz SDR transceiver paired with a Yaesu ATAS-120A auto-tuning antenna as the primary setup. 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 with 500 watts of solar for recharging. 

Transceivers

Yaesu FT-710AESS HF/50MHz

Yaesu FTM-400XDR

Yaesu FTM-7250D

Alinco DR-135T / Argent T3-135 Raspberry Pi APRS digipeater

Yaesu FT-7800 and FT-7900 Raspberry Pi WPSD home-brew repeater

Antennas 

Hustler 5-BTV HF vertical

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

Diamond X-200A 2m / 70cm vertical at 42 feet

Diamond X-50A 2m / 70cm vertical at 29 feet

Yaesu ATAS-120A

Comet CA-2X4SRNMO 2m / 70cm broadband

Mobile and HT

Yaesu FTM-400XDR

This mobile gets the most use of any of my radios. While travelling, band A is usually on 146.520 or on local repeaters at each destination. Band B is always running APRS. 

Yaesu FT5D with a Diamond SRH519 antenna

Yaesu FT3D with a Diamond SRH519 antenna

Yaesu FT-70D with a Diamond SRH519 antenna

Yaesu FT-60, the tried and true HT

Computers

HP ProDesk 600 G3 Micro, Quad Core i5-7500T on Linux Mint OS

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

Dell XPS laptop on Linux Mint OS

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 5 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!

Off-Road Mobile Station

Off-road camping northwest of Tucson, Arizona