[Premium-Rx] Powering receivers away from electricity grid

[Ben Dover]

Hello Eric.

Over here, we've got two different approaches to the problem.

Approach #1 - Leave the Premium receivers at home, and take rigs that can
operated directly from 12 VDC. Provide said 12 volts with solar panels and
deep cycle batteries.

Here, the choices are Icom R71 and R7000, Drake R8, and JRC NRD525. They're
not as sexy as the Racal and WJ iron, but they get the job done. 

One note on solar; virtually ALL commercially made charge controllers these
days use pulse charging (read that as digital), and that means receiver 
noise. I beat that with an analog charger kit I found out on the net, the
Universal Solar Charge Controller SCC2a, designed by G. Forrest Cook, and
available from this website;  http://www.cirkits.com


Approach #2 - It's a good bit more of a hassle, and a case of swatting a fly
with a sledgehammer unless you're taking on the power load of a fairly large
transmitter too, but I came up with a military surplus gasoline generator
for use in case Y2K was as bad as they said it could get. I didn't need it
then, but it HAS been useful in several extended power outage situations.

The beast is designed for 208 VAC 3 phase, and provides 110 VAC from any
of the phases to the neutral lead. The military rated it for 3500 watts, but
the civilian versions of the same machine are rated for aprox. 5000 watts.

The alternator has brushes, but the military specified shielding and a lot of
filtering, including shielded ignition system, that cleans it up nicely. I
suppose they wanted to run radios with it too.

Some time ago, the Defense Department had a program to simplify thier
inventory
and standardization problems with generators, and they dumped ALL gasoline 
powered machines. There may well still be some mil gasoline units at surplus 
stores at reasonable prices. Mine was picked up for perhaps 10% of it's
acquistion cost and was almost new; it was released to hams thru the MARS 
program.

The multitude of gas MIL spec machines were all replaced by perhaps a dozen
machines, from 1 KVA to 250 KVA, and all Diesel powered. There's even a small
unit (about 1 KVA) that is air droppable and housed in a soundproof box for
field use in situagions where the noise of a conventional generator would 
possibly attract the attention of an enemy.


73's,

Tom, W9LBB