Computer-less Shack? Power. Poles and new Radios.

Well, I've done it. I don't have PCs running in the shack.. otherwise known as my study (except for my work laptop that hasn't moved yet). 

I am, of course, sitting in said study right now, staring at a screen and typing on a keyboard. 

The computer however is on the other side of the wall. As are the computers connected to the radio. 

I decided a while ago that the Intel NUC PC was too low powered for me. I was constantly maxxing out the CPU - something I've never done on a PC before without trying. Most of my old PC became a server that handles my storage and media, minus the motherboard as I was trying to rule out an intermittent issue that turns out was related to power management. 

I ordered a second hand AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, 16GB RAM and an NVIDIA GT730 video card. 

I put them together in an old rack case, complete with my old power supply, added a pair of SSDs and I was back in business.

The old NUC became a second radio PC running Windows. It has the IC706 connected, and I'll use it for running other Windows apps. The other PC really isn't up to much more than just handling WSTJ-X. 2 PCs is a bit overkill, but they're both low powered and there is a point where having a lot of COM ports and multiple audio interfaces becomes quite the pain. 

I recently acquired an ewasted old HP server rack - a full height to replace my half height Hallam rack I've been using for the past few years...

The old Hallam rack - currently for sale

42RU rack in the back of a VW Caddyvan? Sure. About one inch to spare.

 

HP Rack installed and everything running.

My PC, various servers and the two radio PCs are all in the rack. If you pay attention to the pic above, you can see the outline of the Intel NUC. The Kogan Atlas is beside it. 

The black box is a quick 3D print to cover the cables coming in from the study. I haven't quite finished sorting the cabling out yet, so it's still a bit of a mess. The white ducting contains the cabling for the Diamond X200 coming into the house. 

For anyone wondering, the UPS is a 6Kva. It's connected at 10A with its own 10A circuit breaker on the feed in (it's designed for 32A), and has a 10A breaker feeding the UPS fed PDU.  I do have a second PDU in the rack that is direct to mains. It's only there for the benefit of redundant power supplies (the HPE servers). Currently, the run time on the batteries is around 3 hours. I do however need to replace them soon (all 20 x 7.2AH 12v batteries). 

And yes, I do have a tape library there. I'll keep using that until all the tapes die. Until then, it's a pretty effective method of backing up terabytes of data. It's connected via FC. 

So now, I'm back to not really having a computer in the study. It's the other side of the wall, with just HDMI and USB on the wall... well I will, when the USB sockets get here. 

I'm not entirely happy yet - the graphics card I put in my PC really isn't quite up to the task and I'd like the one from the server back. It needs one for HEVC encoding. I've got a suitable card for that coming that I will put in that server and recover my old 1050Ti. Really didn't want to do that, but anyway. 

I have added a PDU to my desk though. I'm sick of the cascading power boards and cables everywhere. A single PDU on my desk behind the monitor can feed the monitors and give me capacity to add computers when I need to work on them. That'll free up the existing power points for other things and help me rationalise some of the miles of cable hanging at my feet. 

I re-wired an APC PDU I had just pulled out of my old rack as it had 32A cabling going into it. I was impressed to find that both the active and neutral lines had their own clamp on ferrites. I replaced with a heavy duty 10A lead, reassembled and tested. In the interests of clarity - you really shouldn't be doing this unless you know what you're doing. I have a piece of paper that says that I'm competent at replacing 10A plug tops (one of the many electrical restrictions in VK), and part of that competency allows for replacement of power cables where appropriate, which is effectively all that I've done. The PDU is programmed to alarm at 5A on either of its channels, and realistically, will never run at more than about 1A. The entire rack right now is only drawing 3.5A - running multiple servers, 3 PCs, a laptop, an idle 3D printer, radios and multiple monitors. 

The PDUs in the rack were already setup with 10A leads. Those are single channel units that were designed for 16A, and they're configured to alarm around 7A. It'd take a lot of gear to actually max this out. Or a couple of mining rigs.

A lot of cable management still needs to be done - both in the rack and in my study. Still progress. 

I'm also awaiting delivery of a 3.9m steel pole. I just don't know when it's going to arrive. I'm going to use that get some height for the new MFJ vertical. 

Finally, I ordered a second hand Icom IC-208H. I'm over the Retevis RT95 being the car. Too much intermod and I'm sick of having the whole radio in there. 

The seller doesn't have the hard to get separation cable for it, but I've heard of people soldering their own tails on to each end and using CAT5 to do the job. Sounds like a plan. Head in the cabin, body in the boot. Much more like it. It was due to arrive today... but pandemics and all that.