As soon as it was possible to move my Covid-era office out of the attic, I did so. Now I'm back up there every so often, and it's a lot more enjoyable.
The first pass of attic-as-office was hastily during Covid, when the place was full of junk and I could barely wedge myself in. There wasn't space to move, which made it hard to clean, and there never seemed to be enough time to do anything other than work. And it was cold, bitter cold.
Since then, things have gotten better. I never take work up here anymore (there's a separate place for that) so that attic is reverted to home lab / radio shack status. It's a lot more pleasant for that, much more the "I am up here because I want to be" rather than "back to the salt mines" feeling. We've done some insulation in the house, and so it's not feeling as cold as it did before.
There are more radios up here than there used to be. An ADS-B antenna looks for aircraft traffic; it's propped up next to the window, and the Pi 3 it's plugged into isn't terribly fast. A somewhat faster Pi 400 controls an Airspy HF+ SDR and a Youloop antenna, serving up bits of the spectrum using OpenWebRX+ at https://rx.dunker-pentatonic.ts.net . And a Pi Zero runs pi-star, which serves as a gateway for my DMR radios. An old Kenwood R-2000 shortwave receiver rounds out the collection (oh, there's also a Sony ICF-2010 not currently running).
The biggest improvement is that I've changed the desk I'm using. I'm not as close to the window, so it's warmer. A decade-old MacBook Air is the shack computer - it's currently tuned to FT8 on 40 meters and those eerie tones. I had never previously figured out how to really get a second screen plugged into the various systems I had been using, but with a little extra space and time and some thoughtful acquisitions of cables several monitors that were paperweights are now usable.
The biggest radio improvement happened just tonight. I have my stepdad's Kenwood R-2000 shortwave radio from the 1980s, a sturdy solid state "communications receiver" which I repaired a few years back when the fuse for the antenna failed. Tonight's improvement was getting the antenna - a long wire stretched out as best you can - away from all of the computer noise sources it had been next to. Voila! With the help of my OpenWebRX+ to zero in on what frequencies have interesting stations, now I am listening to weekend evening programming on WRMI Radio Miami International which has a series of music programs featured.
