For the first 5 decades or so of my life I lived in the suburban Chicago area. This was convenient as I worked there as well, otherwise the commute would have been horrendous. Eventually though it was time to retire, my wife had done so already, and I was getting to that age. We wanted to get out of Illinois and the greater Midwest to a warmer, less snowy environment. We looked at several alternatives including the Midsouth, Florida, Utah and Nevada but our first choice was always Arizona. We had been there often, had family that had lived there, and the wife decided that was where she was going to live. Since I kind of liked her and wanted to live with her, I chose that too. That was the easy part.
We then put our Illinois home up for sale. We had just remodeled my office about 6 months prior, mostly to accommodate my radio obsession. That had involved building a wire chase to the attic in the closet of the second bedroom/office, removing the sliding closet doors to add desk room and repainting the whole room. A couple years before I had several extra electrical circuits installed and even replaced the home HVAC system, partly to provide extra cooling in the upstairs office. It got really hot in the summers there; the old AC just couldn’t handle it. A reworked duct system with strategically placed baffles allowed us to direct more of the cooling upstairs, the old system did not have that.
I had also just recently built my new rack-mount system. This included three 10u cabinets, each with a rack-mounted 30-amp power supply. Using custom-cut panels and Jotto Desk faceplates for the scanners and other radios and a custom rack for the larger Icom R8500 and 746 units, these were a great improvement over shelf-mounted gear. They really did a great job hiding the wires, which was a real obsession for me.
A few years before I had acquired some Centra-Com sectional units from a comm center that was planning on trashing their two-position system. I could have had the entire contents, but I had no place to put them and the wife declined to let me rip out the $5,000 of Elfa shelving we had just installed to accommodate this. I did grab a couple sections for myself and a friend and made use of it for a year or two before I built the cabinet system.
I went thru several shack versions in that office/bedroom, mostly variations on shelves with radios arranged and a boatload of wires bundled up under the desktops. While I was usually able to get them bundled up, moving the radios around usually resulted in total rewiring jobs with unbundling them a part of it. The rack cabinets helped solve that issue.
A few months after these cabinets were ordered, delivered and assembled I had to take it all apart. I was retiring and we were putting the house on the market We planned on buying a new house out west. By this time, we had narrowed our choices down to a specific development in Arizona but hadn’t decided on a specific house. Our real estate agent helped us get our existing house ready for market and she insisted we remove the radios and computers from the second bedroom. We packed everything up and put a recliner and the extra dresser in there as well as replacing the doors to the closet, making it resemble a bedroom once again.
For a while then I was limited to a couple handheld scanners and a laptop except for a 536 in the living room. As a beta tester I had to keep it available, or so I told the wife. I could have done that with the 436 I also had but she didn’t need to know that.
That January we went to Arizona for a couple weeks and rented a home in the development from the builder while we selected a home, lot and options like tiles, faucets and landscaping. We were all set to have a house built to our specifications but then found a better deal on a resale house in the development. It was furnished with better stuff than we had and had a perfectly placed office for the radios and computers. Almost as important was that it had a full 3-car garage.
At the time I was beta-testing the then-new BCD325P2. I loaded up the frequencies for the town our potential new house was in, and it worked great. They had just a couple years prior moved to the local regional P25 system and the 325 worked really well on it. I was happy that I could easily hear the police in my new hometown! Little did I know that wouldn’t last, if I did we might have looked elsewhere.
We made an offer on the house and they accepted. We now had 2 months to pack up the old house, dispose of all the furniture and arrange to move the rest of our stuff 1500 miles southwest.
Back at the old house the wife and I had purchased 100 of those gray plastic flip-top totes from Home Depot. Eventually we bought another 60 or 70 of them as we ran out. We numbered each one and kept a list of what was in each tote. These worked out great as they stacked nicely and were easy to deal with. They were big enough for just about anything we needed and when filled with heavy stuff like radios or books they were still not so heavy as to be unmanageable.
Totes 1 thru 25 were all my radios, accessories and computer stuff. I am not a box-saver so the scanners were basically wrapped in bubble wrap and boxed. I had one tote with just BCT15’s, another with 15X’s and a third with the 536 and 996’s. One tote had only handheld scanners, another had 2-ways and yet another had the Icom. I kept the 325 with me, it was my only scanner for 3 months except for the 996XT in the car.
I had totes dedicated to power cables, another for wall-warts. One tote had 12v power supplies. One had rack panels, another face plates. I had a tote with nothing but serial cables, and another with computer parts. For the non-radio related stuff, we had more of these totes, dishes, knick-knacks, the wife’s crafting and sewing stuff etc. etc. etc.
I decided to take advantage of the situation and purge myself of as much of the accumulated junk that I could. If I could not reasonably see me using it, I put it in “junque” bokes and brought them to the next couple CARMA scanner club meetings. I put it out there for anyone to take what they wanted. Things like older crystal scanners, my older PC’s (I intended to replace them after I arrived in AZ.) and various cables, accessories, antennas and the rest of the accumulated treasures of the past 30 years were given away. Some of the stuff was sold, the proceeds were then given to the waitress who had served our scanner club meetings so well at the pizza place we met at. The rest was picked over by the members and whatever remained was left in the dumpster at the restaurant.
We rented a POD container and stuffed everything we owned in it. We packed up enough cloths etc. for 2 weeks, as well as our laptops and my trusty 325 beta unit into the car and headed west. We had two weeks before we could take possession of the new house, so we stayed at the kids for a few days and then took the long way to Arizona via Omaha, Cheyenne and Albuquerque, the garden spots of the West .
Once we arrived and got into the new house it was 2 weeks before the POD met up with us there, so I had only the 325 to play radio with. It was great for the first day, Monday, we were in the new house. Tuesday however, (Day 2 in our new Arizona home) the police department for the town we live in went encrypted. What kind of luck is that? We had barely 24 hours in the house and they pull the encryption plug on me. They must have known I was coming somehow. I still didn’t have cable TV or internet yet. That was installed the next day. What a bummer!
I survived that of course. There was plenty of other stuff to listen to. The next town over was (and still remains) unencrypted as do most of the other towns in the area, including Phoenix and the sheriff. I am too far out in the desert to hear Phoenix from home, but I could when I went into town for shopping etc.
A couple weeks later the POD arrived and we moved 14 dozen grey totes in the garage as well as a couple dozen trash bags of clothes and stuff to sort thru. The wife and I spent a couple days sorting thru the boxes and putting them in the proper rooms. We then started emptying them of their contents and integrating our stuff with the stuff the prior owner’s left. For some odd reason the wife decided that the bedrooms, kitchen and living room were more important than the office and it wasn’t until those rooms were set up that I was allowed to set up my office. She has weird priorities.
When I did get my office set up, I rebuilt my 3 rack cabinets in a similar fashion as I had them back in Illinois. When we moved in the prior owner had left a huge L-shaped wooden desk that had plenty of room for the radio cabinets and my iMac. Eventually however I bought a table for the radio cabinets as I needed more room on the desk for the phone for my work-from-home retirement job and a pair of external monitors.
After we moved in, I did 2 projects that really enhanced my office. First, we had the carpeting in the office removed and replaced with tile that matched that in the rest of the house. This made it easier for my desk chair as well as moving furniture around. I invested in a few dozen nylon furniture sliders, and they worked out really well with the tile floors. I still use them today!
Next, I hired a carpenter to open up a wall in the office and drill a hole in the cap to run coax and Ethernet cables into the attic. As I live in an HOA I am limited to attic or hidden external antennas. I then had a friend come out and help me install a bunch of antennas in the attic, but for the first summer I made do with some mag-mount antennas on a couple cake pans I stole from the kitchen and placed on top of some 8-foot-tall bookshelves. With the 11-foot ceilings in the house this worked remarkably well. The wife thought we had lost the cake pans in the move and bought new ones, she was pretty steamed at me when she discovered my thievery that fall.
It has now been over 10 years in this house. While we are always looking for our next house, I suspect that this will be my last house. I finally got a decent outside scanner antenna that the HOA assumes is a (legally allowed) TV antenna. Combined with the 16-port multicoupler I built it powers a dozen scanners, a TV (It actually does work for TV!), and a couple SDR’s. I make do with the attic antennas for my HF and 2-way work. If this Ham Radio antenna law ever passes, I figure a dual bander on the roof and a vertical HF antenna in the back yard will be in my future.
All in all, this house has been good for us. The wife likes the weather (Hot summers in Arizona beats cold and snowy winters in Chicago), the house has plenty of room for our stuff and since I put air-conditioning in the garage I have a year-round workshop. The radio listening, while nowhere near as intense as the Chicago area, is still interesting. It was fun spending a couple years searching out the Mil-Air bands, I had a dozen BCT15/15X’s dedicated to that for a long time. These days I make do with half the radios with certain radios dedicated to specific tasks. Using ProScan has been a great way to log activity and find stuff I hadn’t known about. I am also starting to get some low-band skip for the first time, mostly on 33 MHz. fire channels but occasionally elsewhere.
Moving across the country can be a challenge but for us it was an adventure. We were able to do everything on our own terms and luckily had the resources to do it our way. It was fun taking everything apart and starting all over again in the shack, so much so that these days, now that I am fully retired and living a life of leisure, I do it every once in a while just for the fun of it.
We then put our Illinois home up for sale. We had just remodeled my office about 6 months prior, mostly to accommodate my radio obsession. That had involved building a wire chase to the attic in the closet of the second bedroom/office, removing the sliding closet doors to add desk room and repainting the whole room. A couple years before I had several extra electrical circuits installed and even replaced the home HVAC system, partly to provide extra cooling in the upstairs office. It got really hot in the summers there; the old AC just couldn’t handle it. A reworked duct system with strategically placed baffles allowed us to direct more of the cooling upstairs, the old system did not have that.
I had also just recently built my new rack-mount system. This included three 10u cabinets, each with a rack-mounted 30-amp power supply. Using custom-cut panels and Jotto Desk faceplates for the scanners and other radios and a custom rack for the larger Icom R8500 and 746 units, these were a great improvement over shelf-mounted gear. They really did a great job hiding the wires, which was a real obsession for me.
A few years before I had acquired some Centra-Com sectional units from a comm center that was planning on trashing their two-position system. I could have had the entire contents, but I had no place to put them and the wife declined to let me rip out the $5,000 of Elfa shelving we had just installed to accommodate this. I did grab a couple sections for myself and a friend and made use of it for a year or two before I built the cabinet system.
I went thru several shack versions in that office/bedroom, mostly variations on shelves with radios arranged and a boatload of wires bundled up under the desktops. While I was usually able to get them bundled up, moving the radios around usually resulted in total rewiring jobs with unbundling them a part of it. The rack cabinets helped solve that issue.
A few months after these cabinets were ordered, delivered and assembled I had to take it all apart. I was retiring and we were putting the house on the market We planned on buying a new house out west. By this time, we had narrowed our choices down to a specific development in Arizona but hadn’t decided on a specific house. Our real estate agent helped us get our existing house ready for market and she insisted we remove the radios and computers from the second bedroom. We packed everything up and put a recliner and the extra dresser in there as well as replacing the doors to the closet, making it resemble a bedroom once again.
For a while then I was limited to a couple handheld scanners and a laptop except for a 536 in the living room. As a beta tester I had to keep it available, or so I told the wife. I could have done that with the 436 I also had but she didn’t need to know that.
That January we went to Arizona for a couple weeks and rented a home in the development from the builder while we selected a home, lot and options like tiles, faucets and landscaping. We were all set to have a house built to our specifications but then found a better deal on a resale house in the development. It was furnished with better stuff than we had and had a perfectly placed office for the radios and computers. Almost as important was that it had a full 3-car garage.
At the time I was beta-testing the then-new BCD325P2. I loaded up the frequencies for the town our potential new house was in, and it worked great. They had just a couple years prior moved to the local regional P25 system and the 325 worked really well on it. I was happy that I could easily hear the police in my new hometown! Little did I know that wouldn’t last, if I did we might have looked elsewhere.
We made an offer on the house and they accepted. We now had 2 months to pack up the old house, dispose of all the furniture and arrange to move the rest of our stuff 1500 miles southwest.
Back at the old house the wife and I had purchased 100 of those gray plastic flip-top totes from Home Depot. Eventually we bought another 60 or 70 of them as we ran out. We numbered each one and kept a list of what was in each tote. These worked out great as they stacked nicely and were easy to deal with. They were big enough for just about anything we needed and when filled with heavy stuff like radios or books they were still not so heavy as to be unmanageable.
Totes 1 thru 25 were all my radios, accessories and computer stuff. I am not a box-saver so the scanners were basically wrapped in bubble wrap and boxed. I had one tote with just BCT15’s, another with 15X’s and a third with the 536 and 996’s. One tote had only handheld scanners, another had 2-ways and yet another had the Icom. I kept the 325 with me, it was my only scanner for 3 months except for the 996XT in the car.
I had totes dedicated to power cables, another for wall-warts. One tote had 12v power supplies. One had rack panels, another face plates. I had a tote with nothing but serial cables, and another with computer parts. For the non-radio related stuff, we had more of these totes, dishes, knick-knacks, the wife’s crafting and sewing stuff etc. etc. etc.
I decided to take advantage of the situation and purge myself of as much of the accumulated junk that I could. If I could not reasonably see me using it, I put it in “junque” bokes and brought them to the next couple CARMA scanner club meetings. I put it out there for anyone to take what they wanted. Things like older crystal scanners, my older PC’s (I intended to replace them after I arrived in AZ.) and various cables, accessories, antennas and the rest of the accumulated treasures of the past 30 years were given away. Some of the stuff was sold, the proceeds were then given to the waitress who had served our scanner club meetings so well at the pizza place we met at. The rest was picked over by the members and whatever remained was left in the dumpster at the restaurant.
We rented a POD container and stuffed everything we owned in it. We packed up enough cloths etc. for 2 weeks, as well as our laptops and my trusty 325 beta unit into the car and headed west. We had two weeks before we could take possession of the new house, so we stayed at the kids for a few days and then took the long way to Arizona via Omaha, Cheyenne and Albuquerque, the garden spots of the West .
Once we arrived and got into the new house it was 2 weeks before the POD met up with us there, so I had only the 325 to play radio with. It was great for the first day, Monday, we were in the new house. Tuesday however, (Day 2 in our new Arizona home) the police department for the town we live in went encrypted. What kind of luck is that? We had barely 24 hours in the house and they pull the encryption plug on me. They must have known I was coming somehow. I still didn’t have cable TV or internet yet. That was installed the next day. What a bummer!
I survived that of course. There was plenty of other stuff to listen to. The next town over was (and still remains) unencrypted as do most of the other towns in the area, including Phoenix and the sheriff. I am too far out in the desert to hear Phoenix from home, but I could when I went into town for shopping etc.
A couple weeks later the POD arrived and we moved 14 dozen grey totes in the garage as well as a couple dozen trash bags of clothes and stuff to sort thru. The wife and I spent a couple days sorting thru the boxes and putting them in the proper rooms. We then started emptying them of their contents and integrating our stuff with the stuff the prior owner’s left. For some odd reason the wife decided that the bedrooms, kitchen and living room were more important than the office and it wasn’t until those rooms were set up that I was allowed to set up my office. She has weird priorities.
When I did get my office set up, I rebuilt my 3 rack cabinets in a similar fashion as I had them back in Illinois. When we moved in the prior owner had left a huge L-shaped wooden desk that had plenty of room for the radio cabinets and my iMac. Eventually however I bought a table for the radio cabinets as I needed more room on the desk for the phone for my work-from-home retirement job and a pair of external monitors.
After we moved in, I did 2 projects that really enhanced my office. First, we had the carpeting in the office removed and replaced with tile that matched that in the rest of the house. This made it easier for my desk chair as well as moving furniture around. I invested in a few dozen nylon furniture sliders, and they worked out really well with the tile floors. I still use them today!
Next, I hired a carpenter to open up a wall in the office and drill a hole in the cap to run coax and Ethernet cables into the attic. As I live in an HOA I am limited to attic or hidden external antennas. I then had a friend come out and help me install a bunch of antennas in the attic, but for the first summer I made do with some mag-mount antennas on a couple cake pans I stole from the kitchen and placed on top of some 8-foot-tall bookshelves. With the 11-foot ceilings in the house this worked remarkably well. The wife thought we had lost the cake pans in the move and bought new ones, she was pretty steamed at me when she discovered my thievery that fall.
It has now been over 10 years in this house. While we are always looking for our next house, I suspect that this will be my last house. I finally got a decent outside scanner antenna that the HOA assumes is a (legally allowed) TV antenna. Combined with the 16-port multicoupler I built it powers a dozen scanners, a TV (It actually does work for TV!), and a couple SDR’s. I make do with the attic antennas for my HF and 2-way work. If this Ham Radio antenna law ever passes, I figure a dual bander on the roof and a vertical HF antenna in the back yard will be in my future.
All in all, this house has been good for us. The wife likes the weather (Hot summers in Arizona beats cold and snowy winters in Chicago), the house has plenty of room for our stuff and since I put air-conditioning in the garage I have a year-round workshop. The radio listening, while nowhere near as intense as the Chicago area, is still interesting. It was fun spending a couple years searching out the Mil-Air bands, I had a dozen BCT15/15X’s dedicated to that for a long time. These days I make do with half the radios with certain radios dedicated to specific tasks. Using ProScan has been a great way to log activity and find stuff I hadn’t known about. I am also starting to get some low-band skip for the first time, mostly on 33 MHz. fire channels but occasionally elsewhere.
Moving across the country can be a challenge but for us it was an adventure. We were able to do everything on our own terms and luckily had the resources to do it our way. It was fun taking everything apart and starting all over again in the shack, so much so that these days, now that I am fully retired and living a life of leisure, I do it every once in a while just for the fun of it.
