Well, I finally stopped procrastinating and started tearing down my station. The battered old particle board desk I had most of my gear perched on should have been tossed out ages ago, but I wasn’t sure what to replace it with. MrsGF found an old oak teacher’s desk from about the 1940s era. Huge, very sturdy, lots of drawers and in pretty good condition, so we snagged that and it’s been sitting in the garage for weeks while I kept putting off actually doing anything because I knew it was going to be a huge pain in the neck.
I finally couldn’t put it off any longer. I have to get new desk out of the garage so I have room to park the motorcycle before we get hit with snow. And the old desk, well, I didn’t trust it any more. Frankly, I didn’t trust it much to begin with. Especially with about 200 lbs. of very expensive equipment sitting on it.
So I started disconnecting everything this afternoon. What a mess back there! Cables, coax, grounding wires, USB cables, video cables… Sheesh. And why did I make my jumper coax cables out of LMR-400? It’s so stiff you literally cannot risk moving anything without disconnecting the cables first or you risk breaking the connectors off the equipment. Sigh…
Of course I didn’t label anything. That would be cheating, right? I’m an amateur radio operator. I should know where all that stuff goes by sheer instinct. Or something…
One interesting revelation was the number of wires and cables back there that weren’t actually attached to anything, including coax disappearing into the wall, going to heaven only knows where, wires running down into the basement for some reason, USB cables. I think those things breed like rabbits. I have a whole drawer full of them. And wall warts… Lord, where did they all come from? What equipment do they power?
The interesting thing is going to be trying to put it all back together again into a working station. I can just see myself in a few days holding the RigBlaster and trying to figure out where that USB cable goes – into the computer? Into the transceiver? And what the hell does that little box with the red LEDs on it with the unmarked connectors actually do?
Great fun!
grouchyfarmer 
“Fun”… If you say so.
When you said you didn’t label it all I cringed.
LikeLike
It shouldn’t be too bad. Most of it is common sense stuff. The only real issue is that I have 3 coax cables going to 3 different antennas, and now I can’t remember which one goes to which antenna. It isn’t going to be hard to determine which one goes where, but not labeling those was just plain stupid. Sigh…
LikeLiked by 1 person