What Equipment You Need for a Ham Radio Shack

Video Transcript

"For Expert Village, I'm Kurt Glaser, N7QJM. On today's sessions, we're talking about what actually makes up the ham radio rig, per say. There are just different names for each thing that we use. Our ham radio gear is used is actually called our rig. The shack, where we're actually in right now; the place we're actually at is called a shack and as you can see, it's full of stuff. We're having a lot of fun operating ham radio. Then the actual gear, over here, we call it the rig and we're going to be breaking those down. So, let's go each of those parts right now, so you get a better understanding of what they are. Yes, this is the main component of an amateur radio station. This is the antenna. And, this is an important piece because you feed the antenna with these cables. And, also, since I have this on a pipe here, I need it to be supported. I use these particular pieces here, called guide wires, which support it against the force of the wind. Right now the antenna is facing straight West and of course, what's different? We're in the rain in Seattle. Well, we're continuing now and now we're inside the shack of N7QJM. We're looking in the back of the power supply, right now. These devices, right here; these guys are fuses. Because you can operate by a battery, car battery, or an in house battery if you want, and I'll pan over here to these fuses. These fuses, right there, will allow you to utilize, if it blows out; see if it blows out instead of the other, which is really cool. Which is really cool. Now we have the actual the station in operation right now. So, this is the power supply, the back of the power supply. This is the back of the transceiver, and this is the back of the antenna tuner. And so, let's go the the front now and look at the various pieces. The antenna that we talked about just a little bit ago, that's where this piece actually terminates, it connects to this guy here, and this is the transceiver. This transmits and you can actually see the frequencies changing and you can pick up various. This is your volume, so that's how that works. There's somebody that's tuning. This over here is the signal strength meter, that tells you what the signal strength is. This guy over here, I'll turn it off. This tells you for the rotator, this is the antenna rotator. Unfortunately it doesn't go up and down, it just rotates side to side. Then, of course, down here is the power supply. So, those are the rig. This is the actual rig. The pieces of the rig, again; are the tuner, the antenna, that's a real handy device, so you can use a simple antenna to operate on various frequencies, and then you have the transceiver, then your rotator, and then you also have your power supply. Those are very important. So, that's the rig of N7QJM. "