This is how my station looked circa 1983-84. The fabric covered, "L" shaped operating table was custom made courtesy of Art and myself, along with a stained slat board backboard for a little rustic ambience, and a place to hang my map of Montgomery county. I had amassed quite a few more radios since 1976 and this picture clearly shows a diverse collection of radios and accessories piled in some semblance of order, although it was tough keeping all that stuff together without the appearance of clutter. Also evident is my emerging diversity in interests, as a Commodore VIC-20 home computer can be seen at the extreme left of the picture. My recent acquisition of a Technician class ham license is represented with the addition of a Kenwood TS-700a all-mode 2 meter base radio in center stage, the 2 6 meter AM rigs, and the HT.
Radios and accessories which can be seen here from left to right are a Polycom 6 meter AM rig, and a Lafayette HB-750 6 meter mobile rig on top of that. Higher up on that pile is an AM/FM car radio which I used for tunes, and a frequency counter with prescaler. Further to the right is my battle-tired Midland 13-885, which once was my flagship CB rig 7 years prior, but by now is doing little more than serving as my station clock and as a platform for a homebrew speech compressor, the digital frequency display for the FT-101, and a 90 watt 2 meter amplifier. On top of that is a CPI speech compressor. At the very top is my antenna switchbox, which switched between my Avanti Sigma 4 omni and the Avanti Astro Beam. Taking center stage is a Yaesu FT-101E, the aforementioned Kenwood, an MFJ Antenna tuner and the external VOX adapter for the Kenwood. To the right of that is a D&A Maverick 250, the Realistic TRC-458, and my homemade noise maker box which I built with the Radio Shack sound generator chip that they sold at that time. To the right of that is a Realistic TRC-431, and my Realistic 3-way Watt/Modulation/SWR meter. At the edge of the frame is a Heathkit 8 channel, 2 Meter HT. In the foreground on top of the green fabric, are the VIC-20, the rotor control box for my Astro Beam, a Kenwood MC-50 desk mike, a Turner +2 desk mike, and my 2 Astatic D-104's