Putting a Computer Power Supply to Work in Your Ham Shack

We had a few scavenged tower case computer power supplies kicking around for a while (Photo A). So we launched an investigation online into how these power supplies could be put to new uses and found some excellent instructions. With the use of a talking multimeter, we were able to successfully convert a couple into a 12-volt DC ham shack power supplies and have been using it to run Ron’s Kenwood TM V7A transceiver, using a 300-watt supply, and Mike’s μBitx transceiver, using a 200-watt supply, for a while with no issues. The photos in this article are of Mike’s build, which also brings out the 5-volt and 3.3-volt supplies out for future use.

The links below will take you to articles explaining the conversion. After the links, we will give a detailed description of the connectors and pin configurations and what we did to determine the various wires and pinouts. We did this with a standard 20-pin ATX style power supply unit (PSU), and it’s a bit of a challenging project, so this article is just for awareness and to encourage you to give it a try. Check out this online guide to start: <https://tinyurl.com/y94dhs8w>.

The following link contains pinout tables for the ATX style PSU; we’re interested in the 20-pin connector,>.