[Elecraft] [K3] Smart Charger --- and, technical note library suggestion

[Phil Hystad]

Wes and others...

There is such a wealth of technical information on this reflector that I am a little surprised and maybe a little disappointed that the Elecraft "technical notes" section of their web site is so sparse.  I would like to see a program where some peer reviewed articles are papers are submitted for "publication" on the Elecraft web site.  By peer review, I mean enough review so that an article meets the minimum acceptable rules of Elecraft plus ensuring technical accuracy and fitness for the Elecraft world.

Since there are so many helpful volunteers on this reflector, it would not be hard to create a forum for peer review made up of a varied number of volunteer technical wizards.  I submit that such an article by Wes would be good fodder for experiment if this is a worthy workable idea.

And, there are a lot of others.  In fact, I have been following this reflector for about two months now and merely by mining the material contained herein you could create some worthy information useful to the masses.  I know there are other such locations on the web that provide such information but something useful for Elecraft would be the common denominator of fitness and purpose to the Elecraft product lineup.

Does this make sense, has it been raised before, or maybe there is some hidden corner of the Elecraft web site that I have missed entirely.

73,
phil, K7PEH


On Jan 5, 2010, at 11:22 AM, Wes Stewart wrote:

> Julius, et. al,
> 
> My charger is actually a marriage of some commercial gear with a few tweaks.  The motivation for this was the absolutely horrible RFI from the switch-mode charger in my 5th wheel trailer.  It was so bad that when I had the trailer stored here at home the RFI would actually interfere with OTA TV, so you can imagine what it did to the ham bands.
> 
> Rather than reinventing the wheel, I used an Astron RS-35M for its case, metering, raw DC, heat sink and pass transistors.   Rather than building my own board, I married this to an A&A Engineering smart charger board, (http://www.a-aengineering.com/150PCAAppNotes.pdf) doing a little trickery to allow the use of a fixed current sense resistor while still having some adjustment of the max charge current.
> 
> The heart of this circuit is the UC3906 integrated circuit that is designed for just this purpose. (http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/uc3906.html)
> 
> I shopped the idea of an article about this to ARRL but they weren't interested, so I never completed any further documentation.
> 
> Wes  N7WS
> 
> 
> 
> --- On Tue, 1/5/10, Julius Fazekas n2wn <phriendly1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> From: Julius Fazekas n2wn <phriendly1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [Elecraft] [K3]  New K3 User and New Ham
> To: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
> Date: Tuesday, January 5, 2010, 10:17 AM
> 
> 
> Wes,
> 
> Do share your 30A "smart charger". It's easy enough to find information for
> lower current chargers, but less so for something in this range.
> 
> cheers,
> Julius
> 
> 
> 
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