[NLRS] Advice on auxiliary battery for June contest rover

[jcplatt1 at mmm.com]

Power management in rovers is always an interesting, and challenging,
topic.  For my roving, I tend to take a simplistic approach. I run two
large gage power cords directly from the car battery, through the fire
wall, into the passenger area.  Both power cords are fused on both the
positive and the negative leads right at the battery.   In the passenger
compartment each of these two main power cords have a PowerPole that
connects to a fused breakout box.   All my radios and amps have PowerPoles
which plug into one of these two breakout boxes.  All the radios themselves
plug into one of the breakout boxes while the amps plug into the second
break out box - this helps manage the voltage drop to help insure as best
possible that the radios are not on the same main power line as the amps.
When stopped, I usually keep the car running to keep the car voltage up - I
always keep a window down, or at least cracked open.   My "high power" amps
run no more than about 25-30 amps, so I never transmit on more than one
band at a time (which I think isn't allowed by the rules anyway).   So, for
6m through 3456, I run off the car battery.  For 5.7 and 10GHz, because
these are external right now, I use a separate deep cycle storage battery
that last the whole contest.   I think when you start to run more than 150
watts then the power requirements and power distribution challenge increase
beyond this simplistic approach.

73, Jon
W0ZQ