[NLRS] Advice on auxiliary battery for June contest rover

[David Palm]

Still working as much as possible to pull all of the equipment together for
our rove in the June contest.  Got the DEM 1296 transverter doing its thing
and tuned up a WA5VJB "cheap yagi" for that band, so we'll at least have a
small footprint there.  902 is a long shot at this point, but still
possible.

Next on the agenda is DC power.  I'll be pulling cables from a direct
connection to the battery under the hood into the vehicle (both legs fused,
of course).  We'll be operating with the vehicle running most of the time, I
believe.  But I'd like to have an additional battery, just to help hold up
the voltage.

I have a large lead-acid battery that was part of an array to start a big
generator at a hospital.  I was going to put that on the cargo hitch carrier
on which our antennas are mounted and run cables (both legs fused, of
course) into the vehicle.

Now, how to best handle having two batteries.  K0BG states in his article on
the subject that if I'm not planning on switching back and forth between the
batteries no isolator is needed, that the batteries can just be connected in
parallel:

http://www.k0bg.com/alternator.html

That sounds reasonable and it's simple.  I would like to wire things this
way, just to keep it simple enough to get done before the contest.  But I
just wanting to double-check with some of you rovers out there to make sure
that this is an okay idea.

Thanks and 73,

David  W9HQ