Why a portable shack?

While I would love to have a fixed station in my house, I'm coming up with more and more reasons to forsake the basement radio room for a portable radio shack.

That's not to say that I won't use my radios at home, but I think I'm going to be doing more with the radios while out of the house than in it, and it's easier to accomodate the portable shack at home than it would be to take a permanent station on the road with me.

For starters, I don't have the space in the house to dedicate to a bunch of radio gear. While there are many places where I could set up a radio rig, they all get used for something else at some point. This means having a shack I can set up and take down easily is important, and then I'm halfway to a portable unit already.

Secondly, I don't have the space outside the house for a long antenna. We live on a city lot with neighbours on all sides. Our back yard is completely open; any mast would stick out like a sore thumb.

Thirdly, my house is full of RF trash. I'm going to do some work to narrow down the source and try to filter it out, (stay tuned for more on that,) but the simplest answer is just to get out of the house.

Of course, there are downsides to going portable. I'm going to be limited in power since I'm designing everything to run off a 12V battery. Since I'm not lugging a generator around, I'll be limited in the time I can spend on the air. I'm also going to be limited to portable antennas.

But then again, those limitations present some interesting engineering challenges.