THE SHACK | DXCentral | Because we're all about radio!

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BECAUSE WE'RE ALL ABOUT RADIO

THE SHACK | DX Central's Northshore Studios

Leaving Charleston for the shores of Lake Pontchartrain in Mandeville, LA, a new shack was born

As a young DXer, I would spend hours in reverie, imagining the radio setup of my dreams.

I imagined receivers with knobs, switches and buttons. I imagined the lights on all of the boxes and under the cabinets that would hold my accumulated radio library.

I put my very limited artistic skills to use, drawing elaborate designs of what I thought the ULTIMATE shack would look like.

The problem was, I was 13 years old. The amount of money I would need was simply too far from my reach. I vowed that one day, though, if I had the means, I would build a no-compromise shack of my very own.

Slowly, I started putting the pieces together. A radio here. An antenna there. Small pieces on a budget. All the while, I was practicing the art of DX. Working to perfect my skills of listening, knowing the band and propagation and learning everything I could about antennas and radios. The hope was that one day, I would be able to put it all to use.

Then in 2018, I purchased my first SDR: the Airspy HF+ Dual. I paired it with a W6LVP loop antenna and started pushing my DX to dizzying new heights. I was hearing DX I had only dreamed of hearing before.

Soon, I added another SDR (the SDRPlay RSPdx) and then another (Airspy HF+ Discovery), and another (Perseus) and another (Elad FDM-S3). Next, I started pushing my antenna collection to new heights by incorporating terminated delta loops in the form of multiple KAZ antennas with high-gain amplifiers on them. I added remote termination controls to obtain the maximum nulls on the back side of the antenna. I was cooking.

Then, in 2021, I moved from Charleston, SC to Mandeville, LA. In Charleston and in previous residences, my radio shack always had to share space with my music recording studio. So, space was tight

In Mandeville, though, I had a dedicated room for nothing but DX. It had a window overlooking the backyard that was perfect as an entry point for the array of antennas I planned for deployment. Starting in October of '21, I laid out a rudimentary shack design to get myself started. In April of '22, I gutted the room and began putting together the shack of my dreams.

It continues to be a work in-progress, continually evolving. Gear flows in and out, antennas are raised only to be repurposed or replaced with new iterations.

Montage video showing the building of DX Central's Northshore Studios

The newly renovated Northshore Studios. A clean design was the goal. Upper cabinets to store books and some equipment, with cable organization the keep things tidy. Large, high resolution screens to allow for multiple programs to run at the same time, while also allowing for our DXC Live! livestream