Shack update and OS choices

A shack is what someone interested in radio usually calls where they have their radios permanently installed and used. I´ve never had a shack like that as I live in an apartment and all radio use from here has been temporary and the serious DX chasing has been done at the DX listening club.

Now I start to have something that could be called a shack in my wifes parents summer house where I recently installed a 15,5 M longwire antenna. The receivers you see on the picture here is a borrowed Icom R-70 and the QS1R. I struggle with some interferances but I think I will be able to solve them very soon (more about that in later blog post).

I also got a computer on the bench. It´s actually one of my older main PC:s from a couple of years back. It´s an AMD Duron 1300 MHz with 768 MB RAM and 120 GB disk. It runs Windows XP and soon will have Kubuntu on it too. I actually have been a Linux user since the early days of Slackware, and then Debian (used when I and a friend set up the first email system at our school) via OpenSuse  (chosen because we use Novell Suse Enterprise at work for database servers) and now I think I will try Ubuntu (or actually Kubuntu to give it an european touch). I see Ubuntu being mentioned on the ham radio groups and mailing lists so it might be the best choice now.

I gave up with Linux and changed to Mac when I got the opportunity to be a Campus representative for Apple at my university a few years ago. I liked MacOS very much as it gave me both Unix and some fancy software like iLife. Something I learned during this period was that I will not work with sales in future careers!

I moved to Windows again and it was actually because of radio. My first SDR was the SDR-IQ from RfSpace and the software, SpectraVue, could only run on Windows. But I would like to go back to Linux and if recording capabilities in the new QS1R software arrives I might be able to do that.