The KONG DX Site - Our Gear

With four blokes wanting to use four antennas, there's a bit of logistics to take care of. Here's how the living room in Kongsfjord looks like during the DX season.

First, we have my PCs and SDRs, on the shelf at the back. One Dell Optiplex, Micro Form Factor, and two Intel NUCs control my three Perseus. Each have an 8 TB hard drive. The Diamond 30A power supply powers the hard drives and one of the NUCs. My KiwiSDR is powered by a lab-grade 5VDC PSU, which also feeds two Perseus (a NUC powers the last one). A web-based antenna switch is on the right, because I use four antennas but only have three SDRs.

On the table in front are four DX-Engineering preamps for the beverage feedlines coming through the wall. They are fed by a separate, 13.8VDC PSU (under the bed). From each preamp goes a coax to four splitters. The three to the left will be replaced by Mini-Circuits 8-port splitters like the one on the right.

The KiwiSDR is connected to an 80-metre longwire in N-S orientation. The feedline is amplified with a Wellbrook splitter/preamp. The Cloud-IQ on the table is also connected to the longwire. Other SDRs in my shack is the ColibriNANO and the Airspy R2/Spyverter R2.

Moving to the other end of the living room are Ole Forr's and OJ Sagdahl's gear; five Perseus in all, plus preamps and a number of 8 TB hard drives, also two web based antenna switches. The PCs are hidden from view. The Tandberg Huldra 11 receiver now serves as a front end for my DAB+ receiver on the shelf above, partly hidden.

Finally a peak at TJ Bråtveit's setup, Perseus, Winradio G33DDC and Elad FDM-S2, two PCs and 8 TB hard drives, and a web-based antenna switch.

Linear power supplies is a must, and we have four of these 30A beasts, plus a few small ones. The voltage knob is removed for equipment safety reasons.

There are two mobile broadband networks. The main network is a 4G Telia network with a 200 GB/mo cap. We have remote control of our equipment through this network, using Teamviewer or LogMeIn Pro. The other network is a Telenor 3G (soon to be 4G) network with a 40 GB/mo cap. This is the KiwiSDR network. We have line-of-sight to the transmitters 3 km away so the speed is very good. All internal connections are cabled.