[NLRS] Advice on auxiliary battery for June contest rover

[Philip Hejtmanek]

David,

When I was roving actively, I ended up just carrying a separate deep discharge battery in one of those insulated plastic boxes, completely isolated from the car's electrical system.  Why?  I found that no matter what I did, I always ended up having whine or other noise in my receiver, from the car system, unless I ran that way.  I also carried a fast charger, so I could top it up during downtime.  I never ran the battery out, and I had 100-150 watts on 6-432 and tens of watts on bands above.  It was also easier to manage power wiring.

FYI, I carried an interface cigarette lighter plug, just in case the battery failed somehow, but essentially never used it.

Speaking of noise, i had a pesky problem with an odd hash noise for a long time, until I discovered that my Garmin GPS was putting garbage back into the power system.  A big ferrite core fixed that, but be prepared for the unexpected.

73,

Phil   kf9us


On Jun 3, 2010, at 9:16 AM, David Palm wrote:

> 
> 
> 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
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