I built this desk 10 years ago. The original owner of the house had the ham shack (yes, he was a ham, too!) in a walled off, air conditioned section of the garage. However, the wall was across the inside half of the two-car garage rendering it useless as a garage. I removed the wall and relocated the station into an unused bedroom. The garage is still air conditioned, by the way. :-)
The desk and shelf unit are made from 5/8" and 3/8" plywood, 2x4's, and formica. The desk is 8-feet long, 30" high, 36" deep. The shelf unit is 6' long, 17" high, and 20" deep. The two shelf levels are at 9" and 17" above the desktop.
There is no removing this desk intact from the room or the house: it's too big to fit through the doorways--"I've done built a 'boat' in the basement!!"
Besides, this is one HEAVY piece of furniture. The desktop and the shelf unit have both supported my weight (160 lbs) with no strain or movement.
The space beneath the desktop is open and houses the computer printer on a rolling table, the Pentium computer used for ham radio activities, a 12-volt power supply, and power strips. Coaxial, power, control and audio cables are fed to the different levels through numerous feedthrough holes. There are two under-the-desktop sliding trays (one for the computer mouse and other controls and one for the computer keyboard and remote radio VFO control).
A few years ago, I integrated a 286 computer with my station. I found myself with a dilema: Where to put the monitor. There wasn't space suitable for it on the desktop and I didn't want to cut out a large portion of the shelf unit. One day at work, as I was perusing some business catalogs, I found a desk design which had the monitor mounted below the desktop. Cool! After some sketching and drawing on my little used trig, geometry, and algebra, I came up with the scheme you see in the two pictures below.
The monitor shelf is suspended by four threaded rods from blocks of wood attached by wood screws and glue to the underside of the desktop. Each block is drilled and the upper hole widened to allow for inset of a washer, nut and locking nut. The threaded rod is then attached and the piece put in place. The angle of the monitor shelf is adjusted by nuts.
I calculated the cutout size by the size of the monitor, my normal viewing position, and the angles I would be looking through the desktop. (If you are still in school and wonder if you will ever use geometry, algebra, trigonometry, this is where you will use it.) I cut the hole to size, and 'stepped' the perimeter for the glass to sit on. A local glass company cut the glass to size. The best the glass cutter could do were corners about the radius of a nickel. So, I used that as a guide and the glass fit perfectly. I adjusted it's flushness with the desktop by slow and careful routing of the step.
How does it work? It works great. The monitor is out of the way, allowing room on the desktop for radio equipment. It's not a leg hazard; except for the few times I have ever lifted my feet under the desk, I have never touched the monitor or shelf. Over the course of a contest (24 or 36 hours of operating), I can't really say there is any fatigue that can be attributed to the monitor position. I've found it comfortable operating to be able to look at the radio and monitor by simply looking up or down a bit.
The computer resides under the desk to the left of the operating position and is a low-end Pentium 100. It replaced my old 286 PC when the HD crapped out--they don't make 40 or 80Mb harddrives anymore!! I use the PC strictly for contesting. I have been using TRLog contest software for the past few years. It works great. Most of the basic functions (entering calls, entering exchanges, moving between fields, etc.) are what I consider to be 'natural' -- hitting Enter instead of "+" or Insert, etc. If you aren't using TRLog as your contest software, at least check it out. It merits your attention. (Visualize the usual disclaimer here)
If you have ever tried to copy CW or are still trying to copy CW using the PC internal speaker, try this PC Audio-to-Headphone Interface I put together.
I built two trays under the desktop. One holds the 2-radio audio/antenna switchbox and a computer mouse. The second tray holds a standard 101-key keyboard with an outboard shelf on the righthand side of the tray to hold the remote VFO controller (Ten-Tec Model 301-type) for the Omni VI's.
In the fall of 1999, I built a do-all 2-radio control box. The purpose of the box was to be the focal point for most all of the control cabling in the shack. When I operate 2-radio mode in a contest, there are a number of pieces of equipment involved: the two radios, two 6-band bandpass filter units, a Six-Pak 6-antenna, 2-radio remote antenna switch, an auxiliary switchbox to control headphone audio switching between the two radios and my headphones, switching between the two beam antennas (Force 12 C3E and Cushcraft A3), plus the CW, Mic, and PTT control likes and the band control cables from the radios. In all there are 15 connectors on the back of the 8x4x5 box. As you can see from the pictures, there's a lot of wire, resistors, transistors, relays, and PC boards crammed into the box.
It all works great.
My only reason to reach above the desktop now is to use the paddles, to adjust radio filters, rotate the beam, or take a drink of water.
