So Many Boxes and So Little Time!

by MD0MDI
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A RUB Stack - One of Many

So Many Boxes and So Little Time!

The Whole floor is basically a Building Site and instead of hallways we have either large stacks of RUB Boxes, and if they are not filled with Ham Radio gear then they are filled with Electronic Component’s, This is just a few of the boxes taken out of the Attic Space and placed in the only available space outside of what is my Workshop, This space would have been the second part of the workshop once the walls were sprayed with Preservative, then studding and insulation has been installed first fix with the wiring which you can imagine is a major task, the first part of the workshop has I think about 70 sockets in it and split into two ring mains that are also RF Shielded and Filtered at each end, both rings have also their own electrical earthing point outside, which causes another issue that we have here.

A RUB Stack - One of Many

On the Isle of Man in that everyone on the Island is provided with a TT Electrical Installation meaning that you have to provide your own earth, all well and good if you have a suitable earth around the house, you are hard pushed to see a 1 meter earth rod get into the ground around the house, about 1ft down is bedrock, this means that when you try and do a earth leakage test it would fail every time, in the end we had to find a suitable location to push in an earth rod away from the house, thi turned out to be about 30ft from the house was the only place where earth was deep enough, but even with putting in three different earth rods, the earth leakage test would fail.

 

In the end from the three different earthing  points we also had to roll out and dig into the ground a 350ft earth tape in a long straight line from the original earth rods to all new earth rods, this not only cost a bloody fortune but was also a lot of work, on top of this I need a radio earth, totally different to the Electrical Earth, so this was basically repeated with each of the new RF earthing rods being placed in the ground at least 100 meters away from the electrical earths, thankfully we have the land but doing this all over again was a really pain, plus I was sure that this was the hottest days of the year when I was digging a trench down about a meter deep and this times this was 600ft long and then copied a further 2 times to make sure that I actually had a good earth for the radios. With all this work you would actually think that I would not forget to actually connect the RF earth up to the house, But Opps! I did….

The Unfinished Project

With all the electrical taking about 6 months to sort, and when all this finished I was called into hospital for tests and I was then told of the great news, the entire house which this floor is just a third of the battle, but it was all put on hold, with a lot of rooms either filled with sheets of wood, Plasterboard, Cement Boards or just loads of Timber, So a lot of rooms are filled with RUB Boxes as well, this were getting to the point of being useful due to having so many of each side they would often get labelled and used for just a single type of lead for instance, IEC Mains cables, or a smaller RUB Box for USB Cables, etc. 

The problem though is that these are now everywhere, and yes you can see them from a mile off, remembering where say CAT5 Cables were is a bigger issue, let alone a Drake Radio or a Instruction Manuals.

So although I know that there is a SPC Smart Tuner in one of these boxes, and another has a lot of Morse Keys, I cannot reliably say which boxes they are until I open then and then Label then.

So when you see a photo such as this, I hope that you can see the scale of the problem, you cannot get into the room, you cannot even see stuff that is pretty near or just around the corner out of site, This was never meant to get this bad, I was hoping that my workshop, a bathroom on this floor, and a Ham Shack would have all been finished a long time  ago and I would be doing other projects by now, but this Cancer not only took over my life, but also the others that I live with, the problem is, there is no ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ for this problem, and for those that do not understand that phase, I take it you have never played the board game ‘Monopoly’.

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