This Tale is less about the radios and more about the desks my radios resided on.
Over the decades I have had almost as many desks as I have had radios. Well maybe not THAT many, but I have had a lot! The first desk of mine was also the longest owned desk by me. When I was a pre-school brat my dad got a new desk and put the old one in my bedroom. It was old then, probably made in the 1940’s or 50’s. Mom said they got it from a relative but by the time I asked more about it she could not recall from whom.
This was a sturdy old wooden desk with 4 drawers, a standard layout in offices, schools etc. for the time. Of course, it had a pencil drawer and 3 drawers on the right side. It was brown when I got it, but later on in my teens a friend refinished it with a cherry red stain. It retained this stain color, albeit faded and scratched, for the next 20 years, in several apartments. Over the years it held everything from crystal scanners to BC780XLT’s and PRO2004/5/6’s, including several different Icom R7000’s, a couple different R71’s and even my big old Panasonic RF-4900. As far as computers it had a TRS-80 and a Commodore 128, along with a cheap electric typewriter and even a pre-PC word processor that looked sort of like a typewriter with a 2-line LCD display. Later it held my first “real” computer, an original Mac I upgraded to a Mac Plus. I even had an ImageWriter printer!
This lasted until we bought our first house. The wife decided that it was too old, ugly and decrepit for our new home so in the trash it went. I kind of liked her at the time (still do…) so I acquiesced and bid a fond farewell to that old desk I had had for some 30 years.
After that we went thru several Office Depot type corner and hutch desks. These were of the typical chip-board construction with little dowels and Elmer’s Glue holding them together. By then I had graduated to computers with separate monitors and CPU’s from my trusty old Mac Plus. Mostly Macs of course but with a few DOS/Windows machines here and there populated these cheap self-assembled junk desks. They usually lasted a year or two, between the wife and I we changed things around often enough that the joints would loosen up and start losing stability.
Finally, the wife and I decided to ditch these cheap desks and we gutted the office. We went to The Container Store and designed and bought a huge Elfa system. Our office was the second bedroom in our townhouse, and I had taken the closet doors off to incorporate that space into usable office space.
Elfa, if you were not aware, makes a neat system for shelving, desks and closets. Our system used heavy steel horizontal brackets that mounted into the ceiling cap at the top of the wall. Steel dual-channel vertical supports hung on these horizontal pieces, then steel dual-channel shelf brackets clipped onto the verticals. This left about a one-inch space between the shelf and wall, perfect for running wires.
Desktops required larger shelf brackets but otherwise mounted on the same verticals. This allowed for a consolidated system with desktops and shelves of various sizes. The only math you needed for Elfa was knowing that 30” plus 24” equaled 54”. All the shelves were either 30 or 24 inches wide with various depths and the desktops were 54 inches wide with 30” depths. Knowing this allowed one to easily space the verticals properly to allow adjacent shelves to share a centering bracket with special shelf joiners that fit in the slot of the brackets. Once one understood how the system worked it was easy to design a setup for any sized office.
Our original Elfa system encompassed our entire office. We put the horizontal bars all around the room, and bought a dozen of the desktops, dozens of different shelves of various sizes along with all the necessary shelf and desk brackets. I took the extra step to also buy table legs for the desktops as I had a 27” CRT monitor for my Mac Pro at the time, that monitor weighed a metric ton, and I was worried it would not support it. I found out later that it would, so I really did not need the table legs after all, but they allowed me to sleep better knowing they were there.
This whole thing was really expensive; we spent over $3500 for it all (in 1997 dollars) but got it all installed over a single weekend. My desk was on the far left, using the closet space (east wall) and half of the south wall. The wife used the other half of the south wall; we had a couple printers and a flat-bed scanner on the west wall with the window. On the north wall we had my 1/200 airplane collection, a couple hundred model airliners.
Over the years I built and remodeled my shack several times with this system. I put the computers and larger radios on the desktops and the smaller radios on shelves. Eventually I had about a dozen BCT15/15X scanners dedicated to Fire Tone Out, my obsession at the time along with various other scanners, ham and GMRS transceivers and accessories. The verticals, combined with the inch spacing between the wall and shelves, were used to route wires to the radios. I installed wire guides and power strips under the desks and tried to keep the wiring neat. CRTs were replaced by LCD screens and iMacs.
A year or so before I retired and moved to Arizona I got into rack-mounting. I bought 3 10u cabinets and all the faceplates needed to rack-mount my radios. I assembled the cabinets in the garage as free-standing independent units, each with a 25A power supply and radios installed to eliminate any need for wiring between the 3 cabinets. One had all the radios that were connected to a computer for logging, this one had a USB hub. Another had 2-way radios while another had FTO receivers. 2 of the cabinets had a single scanner antenna connected to a multicoupler in each and the transceiver cabinet had several antennas cables as they could not share antennas.
Once assembled I lugged the cabinets upstairs into the office and merely placed them on the desktops, connected the antennas in each and plugged in the single AC power cable for each. This cleaned up the wiring enormously and lasted for a year or so until we put the house on the market. I disassembled the whole system and packed all the scanners into tote boxes. We removed and gave away all the Elfa stuff and repainted the office, popping in a recliner and a TV for the real estate showings.
When we moved into the current house here in Arizona it came furnished. In the office was a huge L-shaped Executive desk. This thing was super heavy, and I reused my rack cabinets here. I had over the next year or two placed one or two of these cabinets on this desk with the other(s) on a side table.
Eventually I bought a separate table for the radio cabinets. I found what was supposed to be a dining room table at a furniture store that fit my needs. It was a simple 80” wide table and fairly inexpensive. I used it for the three radio cabinets so I could use the regular desk for my computers and work phone (I had a retirement work-from-home gig).
Pretty soon however the wife suggested a large networking cabinet for the radios. She recalled me installing one of these in the past in our 9-1-1 center and she thought a smoked glass door covering the radios would look nice. I bought one and spent a weekend installing all my radios in it. That made the table redundant, and it was used by the wife for her sewing room for a while.
Then I started thinking about a standing desk. We ordered from the Office Depot website a mid-priced “Magellan” desk (roughly $350) that was 60x30 inches, went up to a decent height where I could stand and work on the computer. I gave my large L-Shaped Executive desk to a friend. We were pleasantly surprised by the sturdiness of this desk, so the wife bought one too, for her sewing room to use as a cutting and assembly table.
Eventually I realized that this desk was too small for me. I was using 4 monitors and needed more room. In addition, the wife wanted a second desk for her room. I started looking into larger desks and decided on an L-shaped standing desk and we would repurpose my existing desk for the sewing room. I looked at a couple different brands and chose to get a Lander L-shaped desk. I was all set to order one for about $4000 when I came across Uplift. I really liked Uplift’s desk-designing page and selected their largest model with a few options for less than half the price of the equivalent Lander. I was not disappointed. We ordered the Uplift on a Tuesday; it arrived in several extremely heavy boxes that Thursday. After I finished working Friday afternoon the wife and I cleared out the office (we are really getting good at that) and assembled the new desk. The old desk was set up in the wife’s sewing room.
It only took a couple hours for us to assemble the new desk. It had casters so was easy to move around the office once built. It had tons of room for monitors and computers; I even had some radios on it from time to time.
I used this desk for a couple years until I retired from the work-from-home job a couple months before the son and daughter in law moved in. He also worked from home, and we were sharing the office, so I gave him my big desk and used one of the Magellan desks for a while.
I saw a couple videos on YouTube about the then brand new SecretLab Magnus Pro series desks, and I really liked them. What I really liked was the wire management tools they come with and the various accessories available. While intended for gamers, they work really well for radios as well as computer stuff.
I ordered the Magnus ProXL and it arrived a few days later. It came in two huge and extremely heavy cardboard boxes. These things were really HEAVY, and the boxes were well beat up. The contents however are well protected and were totally undamaged. I had to leave for the day, but when I got home the kid had assembled it all for me, it took all of an hour. It took me longer to cut up the boxes and packing foam than to assemble the desk.
This desk was intended for my computer and monitors. At the time I was using a MacBook Pro, a CalDigit TS4 dock and 3 monitors. There was plenty of room for it all. Later I switched to a Windows PC I built in a large Fractal North case. I bought the under-desk mount for the CPU, and it saved me tons of desktop space by slinging it under the desk. I then bought a second of these CPU mounts for my UPS, saving even more space.
After the kids moved out a couple years later, I bought a Home Depot (Husky) worktable for my radios, keeping the SecretLab desk for the computer. I had retired the large networking cabinet, replacing it with a 3-bay cabinet and reduced the fleet of radios. This worked well but it was a bit too small and not really easy to raise and lower with a hand-crank. I also had no place to mount the PC. I thought of a few solutions but the one that really jumped out at me was getting another SecretLab desk.
This would really be the solution I was looking for. It was big enough and strong enough, easy to raise and lower, and I could stash the PC under the desk. I went to the website and ordered it, and it arrived a couple days later. This time I had to assemble it by myself.
It was a little difficult to wrangle the heavy boxes into the house, I really should have taken the FedEx driver’s offer to bring it inside for me. After that it was a pretty simple thing to assemble it. Basically, I removed the desktop itself from the larger box, placing it upside down on the foam cover that it was shipped with on the floor in the office. I then installed the two legs; these had the machine screws already in place and the legs slip into slots on the desktop frame. Then the leveling feet install onto the legs and then I installed the wire tray.
After this we flipped the desk over and installed the hinged rear lid and desk mat. All in all, it probably took 30 or 40 minutes from delivery to finish. The next day I cut up the boxes and foam inserts, the foam took 4 large lawn bags to contain it all, and the boxes and other cardboard parts got cut into 2x2 foot pieces and stuffed into a couple smaller boxes for recycling.
After this I was able to install my radio console and get it all wired up. This did not take long at all.
The only complaint I have about the SecretLab desks is the lack of casters. I had ceramic tile floors and use nylon sliders, but these still are a bit difficult to move around. Other than that, these things are awesome and I suspect I will keep them for decades. The Husky has been relegated to the garage as a workbench (for which it really was intended) but one never knows if it will appear in the office again in the future.
I also have a Husky tool bench in the office on the back wall. I use the drawers for things like batteries, a few tools to be used here in the office, radio accessories and the like. The work surface is pretty high up off the ground, so it is easy to use for small projects.
One has a ton of options for desks for the radio room. I once had a chance at a full 2-position CentraCom II console system that I really would have loved to set up but I just did not have the room for it at the time. I suspect I would still have it here. I had a friend who had a similar system in his basement.
Over the decades I have had almost as many desks as I have had radios. Well maybe not THAT many, but I have had a lot! The first desk of mine was also the longest owned desk by me. When I was a pre-school brat my dad got a new desk and put the old one in my bedroom. It was old then, probably made in the 1940’s or 50’s. Mom said they got it from a relative but by the time I asked more about it she could not recall from whom.
This was a sturdy old wooden desk with 4 drawers, a standard layout in offices, schools etc. for the time. Of course, it had a pencil drawer and 3 drawers on the right side. It was brown when I got it, but later on in my teens a friend refinished it with a cherry red stain. It retained this stain color, albeit faded and scratched, for the next 20 years, in several apartments. Over the years it held everything from crystal scanners to BC780XLT’s and PRO2004/5/6’s, including several different Icom R7000’s, a couple different R71’s and even my big old Panasonic RF-4900. As far as computers it had a TRS-80 and a Commodore 128, along with a cheap electric typewriter and even a pre-PC word processor that looked sort of like a typewriter with a 2-line LCD display. Later it held my first “real” computer, an original Mac I upgraded to a Mac Plus. I even had an ImageWriter printer!
This lasted until we bought our first house. The wife decided that it was too old, ugly and decrepit for our new home so in the trash it went. I kind of liked her at the time (still do…) so I acquiesced and bid a fond farewell to that old desk I had had for some 30 years.
After that we went thru several Office Depot type corner and hutch desks. These were of the typical chip-board construction with little dowels and Elmer’s Glue holding them together. By then I had graduated to computers with separate monitors and CPU’s from my trusty old Mac Plus. Mostly Macs of course but with a few DOS/Windows machines here and there populated these cheap self-assembled junk desks. They usually lasted a year or two, between the wife and I we changed things around often enough that the joints would loosen up and start losing stability.
Finally, the wife and I decided to ditch these cheap desks and we gutted the office. We went to The Container Store and designed and bought a huge Elfa system. Our office was the second bedroom in our townhouse, and I had taken the closet doors off to incorporate that space into usable office space.
Elfa, if you were not aware, makes a neat system for shelving, desks and closets. Our system used heavy steel horizontal brackets that mounted into the ceiling cap at the top of the wall. Steel dual-channel vertical supports hung on these horizontal pieces, then steel dual-channel shelf brackets clipped onto the verticals. This left about a one-inch space between the shelf and wall, perfect for running wires.
Desktops required larger shelf brackets but otherwise mounted on the same verticals. This allowed for a consolidated system with desktops and shelves of various sizes. The only math you needed for Elfa was knowing that 30” plus 24” equaled 54”. All the shelves were either 30 or 24 inches wide with various depths and the desktops were 54 inches wide with 30” depths. Knowing this allowed one to easily space the verticals properly to allow adjacent shelves to share a centering bracket with special shelf joiners that fit in the slot of the brackets. Once one understood how the system worked it was easy to design a setup for any sized office.
Our original Elfa system encompassed our entire office. We put the horizontal bars all around the room, and bought a dozen of the desktops, dozens of different shelves of various sizes along with all the necessary shelf and desk brackets. I took the extra step to also buy table legs for the desktops as I had a 27” CRT monitor for my Mac Pro at the time, that monitor weighed a metric ton, and I was worried it would not support it. I found out later that it would, so I really did not need the table legs after all, but they allowed me to sleep better knowing they were there.
This whole thing was really expensive; we spent over $3500 for it all (in 1997 dollars) but got it all installed over a single weekend. My desk was on the far left, using the closet space (east wall) and half of the south wall. The wife used the other half of the south wall; we had a couple printers and a flat-bed scanner on the west wall with the window. On the north wall we had my 1/200 airplane collection, a couple hundred model airliners.
Over the years I built and remodeled my shack several times with this system. I put the computers and larger radios on the desktops and the smaller radios on shelves. Eventually I had about a dozen BCT15/15X scanners dedicated to Fire Tone Out, my obsession at the time along with various other scanners, ham and GMRS transceivers and accessories. The verticals, combined with the inch spacing between the wall and shelves, were used to route wires to the radios. I installed wire guides and power strips under the desks and tried to keep the wiring neat. CRTs were replaced by LCD screens and iMacs.
A year or so before I retired and moved to Arizona I got into rack-mounting. I bought 3 10u cabinets and all the faceplates needed to rack-mount my radios. I assembled the cabinets in the garage as free-standing independent units, each with a 25A power supply and radios installed to eliminate any need for wiring between the 3 cabinets. One had all the radios that were connected to a computer for logging, this one had a USB hub. Another had 2-way radios while another had FTO receivers. 2 of the cabinets had a single scanner antenna connected to a multicoupler in each and the transceiver cabinet had several antennas cables as they could not share antennas.
Once assembled I lugged the cabinets upstairs into the office and merely placed them on the desktops, connected the antennas in each and plugged in the single AC power cable for each. This cleaned up the wiring enormously and lasted for a year or so until we put the house on the market. I disassembled the whole system and packed all the scanners into tote boxes. We removed and gave away all the Elfa stuff and repainted the office, popping in a recliner and a TV for the real estate showings.
When we moved into the current house here in Arizona it came furnished. In the office was a huge L-shaped Executive desk. This thing was super heavy, and I reused my rack cabinets here. I had over the next year or two placed one or two of these cabinets on this desk with the other(s) on a side table.
Eventually I bought a separate table for the radio cabinets. I found what was supposed to be a dining room table at a furniture store that fit my needs. It was a simple 80” wide table and fairly inexpensive. I used it for the three radio cabinets so I could use the regular desk for my computers and work phone (I had a retirement work-from-home gig).
Pretty soon however the wife suggested a large networking cabinet for the radios. She recalled me installing one of these in the past in our 9-1-1 center and she thought a smoked glass door covering the radios would look nice. I bought one and spent a weekend installing all my radios in it. That made the table redundant, and it was used by the wife for her sewing room for a while.
Then I started thinking about a standing desk. We ordered from the Office Depot website a mid-priced “Magellan” desk (roughly $350) that was 60x30 inches, went up to a decent height where I could stand and work on the computer. I gave my large L-Shaped Executive desk to a friend. We were pleasantly surprised by the sturdiness of this desk, so the wife bought one too, for her sewing room to use as a cutting and assembly table.
Eventually I realized that this desk was too small for me. I was using 4 monitors and needed more room. In addition, the wife wanted a second desk for her room. I started looking into larger desks and decided on an L-shaped standing desk and we would repurpose my existing desk for the sewing room. I looked at a couple different brands and chose to get a Lander L-shaped desk. I was all set to order one for about $4000 when I came across Uplift. I really liked Uplift’s desk-designing page and selected their largest model with a few options for less than half the price of the equivalent Lander. I was not disappointed. We ordered the Uplift on a Tuesday; it arrived in several extremely heavy boxes that Thursday. After I finished working Friday afternoon the wife and I cleared out the office (we are really getting good at that) and assembled the new desk. The old desk was set up in the wife’s sewing room.
It only took a couple hours for us to assemble the new desk. It had casters so was easy to move around the office once built. It had tons of room for monitors and computers; I even had some radios on it from time to time.
I used this desk for a couple years until I retired from the work-from-home job a couple months before the son and daughter in law moved in. He also worked from home, and we were sharing the office, so I gave him my big desk and used one of the Magellan desks for a while.
I saw a couple videos on YouTube about the then brand new SecretLab Magnus Pro series desks, and I really liked them. What I really liked was the wire management tools they come with and the various accessories available. While intended for gamers, they work really well for radios as well as computer stuff.
I ordered the Magnus ProXL and it arrived a few days later. It came in two huge and extremely heavy cardboard boxes. These things were really HEAVY, and the boxes were well beat up. The contents however are well protected and were totally undamaged. I had to leave for the day, but when I got home the kid had assembled it all for me, it took all of an hour. It took me longer to cut up the boxes and packing foam than to assemble the desk.
This desk was intended for my computer and monitors. At the time I was using a MacBook Pro, a CalDigit TS4 dock and 3 monitors. There was plenty of room for it all. Later I switched to a Windows PC I built in a large Fractal North case. I bought the under-desk mount for the CPU, and it saved me tons of desktop space by slinging it under the desk. I then bought a second of these CPU mounts for my UPS, saving even more space.
After the kids moved out a couple years later, I bought a Home Depot (Husky) worktable for my radios, keeping the SecretLab desk for the computer. I had retired the large networking cabinet, replacing it with a 3-bay cabinet and reduced the fleet of radios. This worked well but it was a bit too small and not really easy to raise and lower with a hand-crank. I also had no place to mount the PC. I thought of a few solutions but the one that really jumped out at me was getting another SecretLab desk.
This would really be the solution I was looking for. It was big enough and strong enough, easy to raise and lower, and I could stash the PC under the desk. I went to the website and ordered it, and it arrived a couple days later. This time I had to assemble it by myself.
It was a little difficult to wrangle the heavy boxes into the house, I really should have taken the FedEx driver’s offer to bring it inside for me. After that it was a pretty simple thing to assemble it. Basically, I removed the desktop itself from the larger box, placing it upside down on the foam cover that it was shipped with on the floor in the office. I then installed the two legs; these had the machine screws already in place and the legs slip into slots on the desktop frame. Then the leveling feet install onto the legs and then I installed the wire tray.
After this we flipped the desk over and installed the hinged rear lid and desk mat. All in all, it probably took 30 or 40 minutes from delivery to finish. The next day I cut up the boxes and foam inserts, the foam took 4 large lawn bags to contain it all, and the boxes and other cardboard parts got cut into 2x2 foot pieces and stuffed into a couple smaller boxes for recycling.
After this I was able to install my radio console and get it all wired up. This did not take long at all.
The only complaint I have about the SecretLab desks is the lack of casters. I had ceramic tile floors and use nylon sliders, but these still are a bit difficult to move around. Other than that, these things are awesome and I suspect I will keep them for decades. The Husky has been relegated to the garage as a workbench (for which it really was intended) but one never knows if it will appear in the office again in the future.
I also have a Husky tool bench in the office on the back wall. I use the drawers for things like batteries, a few tools to be used here in the office, radio accessories and the like. The work surface is pretty high up off the ground, so it is easy to use for small projects.
One has a ton of options for desks for the radio room. I once had a chance at a full 2-position CentraCom II console system that I really would have loved to set up but I just did not have the room for it at the time. I suspect I would still have it here. I had a friend who had a similar system in his basement.
