In my post on my working on rack configuration ideas, Paul W7PFB bought up a great question – what about the power & wiring configuration?
I’m envisioning three distribution situations, a 240v amp power supply, a 110v AC power supply and a nominal 12v DC (actually 13.8v) dual power supply.
The Amp’s 240v single phase is straight forward, as I have a 240v receptacle where I’m planning to position the rack.
The 110v AC is being handled by the rack power strip, which has as many receptacles on its back as on its face. Including plugging in the two DC power supplies all 110v needs will be routed there.
The nominal 12v DC (which is of course actually 13.8v) is supplied by two Astron power supplies. Here I have a pending decision to make of whether to transfer over the existing West Mountain RigRunners or to finally make the leap to a preferred type of power connector?
Realistically the connector change is going to wait and the existing setup will move over.
I’ve sketched the general flow:
K9ZW Rack Layout Sketch

K9ZW Rack with Power Markup
Planning to “pin” the Power Poles for security until such time as make a transition.
Actual cable routing has started with some general rack hardware, and I’ll likely use some plastic removable-top square cable tray in places.
Another set pair of wiring considerations are Cat6e to a router (not shown) that will be at the back of a shelf on the rack, along with “other control wiring” for the Flex-6000 (USB cables) and Serial Cables for the Station Genius plus legacy device usage.
Ground is going to be pretty straight forward, as I will run a copper pipe down the rack, and us braid to ground the various devices.
RF will also be fairly straight forward by a jumper from the tuner off the rack.
Additional jumping off the rack will be a station ground tie-in by braid, Ethernet, rotor control cables where I’ve been using 10-pin trailer type hookups, audio balanced cable for a local studio microphone, and the two types of power. Whew!
Great question Paul W7PFB! Thank you!
73
Steve
K9ZW