I don't know what I was thinking when I drew up the station arrangement for that season. Looking back on it, though, I don't think that I was thinking anything at all! Not only were two TS440's involved, but there were two monitors and two computers. Anyone else would have made that work. Anyone else.
The reason for that, primarily, is because they probably wouldn't have stacked them. It is true...both the TS440s and the monitors were stacked. On top of that (no pun intended), if you could have seen under the desk, you would have noticed that the computers were stacked, as well. Guess what. No bandpass filters, either! What I had invented was a microwave...but instead of cooking food, we cooked radios, monitors, and computers, thanks to home-made coax jumpers built with only a butter knife and electrical tape.
Just when it couldn't get any worse...someone loaned me a 1kW linear amp for the run radio. At this point, I'm completely sure I worked every single appliance in Western Massachusetts. That happened during the same weekend when I changed over the feedlines. During the changeover, I found myself with an excess of coax. What did I do? I spooled it up right outside the window, effectively creating the perfectly resonant coax choke. I had, in effect, cut my feedline electrically in half. What else could I do completely wrong?
For starters, I never got around to building an actual SO2R controller. This is where it gets really, really, really good. I only had gotten around to building one computer-rig interface cable, so the run radio had to be manually tuned. The spot radio was interfaced, thankfully, but the paroty was off and it timed out every ten minutes (just in time to not work another mult). In addition, I had no microphone switch. At the beginning of the season, I actually had to physically un-plug and switch the microphone to the other radio. That was really, really bad. Mid-way thru the season, I purchased a second microphone. This one was a desk mic, so I had my headset mic going to the run, and the desk mic going to the mult. That was a little better.
The antenna situation is what made this setup famous. I had one big rotary switch to select the antennas. Between that and the radios was a two-position switch that selected just what radio got control of the switch. This meant that, just to work a station on the second radio, I had to stop listening with the first, switch the antennas, microphones, and the necessary logging program changes. I actually got good at this...I timed my switching period once. It came out to be half a minute - talk about blazing speed! That really raised those QSO rates.
Anyway, back to the RFI. The radios on top of each other were blowing RF into each other's front ends so bad that I actually invented the "monitor" function now available on most high-end radios. Except my monitor function was hearing the mult radio thru the headphones attached to the run radio. The monitors caused equal problems to each other. The close proximity messed with the magnetic patterns of the screen, and so neither one displayed correctly. To dispell all of this interference, what is a cheap ham to do but use ALUMINUM FOIL? I set out to wrap every single piece of equipment I had in the stuff. The room, eventually, looked like MIR. It worked just about as well, too. Around this time, I ran my first multi-op contest. That was interesting, but came with added challenges. I made a warning sign for the other three operators...it was a piece of aluminum foil taped to the wall. All it said was, "If you see this on the ground, something isn't shielded!"
The big problem with doing anything multi-op, be it M/S or M/2, was that the operators had to receive a Ph.D. in using the station before they could even think about a bandchange. That probably wasn't the best approach, but it sure was funny as hell. It wasn't like any of their mistakes could hurt the equipment more than it already was. If you heard me mention M/2 earlier and did a double-take, we did do that, too. Unfortunately, the shack is not wide enough to fit two people side-by-side, so we moved the top radio off the desk and onto the floor behind the first operating position. The mult operator had to lay on his stomach to play radio! That's not all...the M/2 setup used the same switching alignment, so when those ten minutes rolled around, the run operator (usually me) had to stop his (my) run, and surrender the antennas to the mult guy. Now, for the love of all things holy, where was the advantage in that?
In terms of surrendering the "antennas", a better phrase might be surrendering the somewhat-resonant wires criss-crossing the yard. There were so many at point, in fact, it felt like a jungle of feedlines. If you thought that I had some system for organizing all of these cables, you would be wrong. They were all shoved into a PVC pipe and ran into the basement. This was shortly after the "coax choke" incident, so I made no attempt to do anything with the extra line. So, they simply strangled one of the bushes. My mother was extra fond of that. If you looked close enough, you could even see a knot in the VHF feedline. I was going to fix it, but then I remembered my 3 QSO's per year on VHF, and lost the motivation.
Operating such a world-class station (please laugh at that) is not without technical problems, though. In WPX CW one year, lack of code understanding coupled with antennas falling out of the air rendered us with a grand total of three contacts at the end of the weekend...and that includes a dupe! We had the nerve to work three guys, and two of them were the same one! Having said that, the one contact we had that was actual DX pulled us right out of the pileup...and this was a "top of the solar cycle" pileup, too.
The funny part about all of this is that we did have a lot of fun and we did make a lot of contacts. I would refine the multi-radio situation more and more over time. Isn't that what being a ham is all about? Doing things the only way you can and making due with that? Or is ham radio spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on high-end gear to beat guys like me who have to try? Whatever your answer is, I sure know I will take the first one anyday (mostly because I don't have thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to spare). What we learned about operating and "electronics" is knowledge I call on every contest now. Oh, and, in case you were wondering, I'm down to the milli-second range in switch time now.