From seanthomaskelly at hotmail.com Fri Oct 2 20:58:33 2009 From: seanthomaskelly at hotmail.com (Sean Kelly) Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2009 17:58:33 -0700 Subject: [Tandy] TRC-101B battery operation question Message-ID: Hello List, I have acquired a TRC-101B, Radio Shack's 23 channel crystal controlled walkie talkie with the battery/RF power out/signal strength meter. It has room for twelve batteries. Assuming these are ni-cads, the voltage would be 14.4 Volts. I actually powered the rig with a 12 Volt power supply and the battery meter read exactly on the "bad-good" line. I've heard that you shouldn't go below 1.05 Volts per ni-cad cell, so reaching this "bad-good" line on the meter would be an indication that it's time to recharge the batteries. But my question is how many carbon-zinc or alkaline batteries should be used with this rig, if it can be used with them? Ten of these and two dummy batteries would give 15 Volts. I'm sure this is too high because the rig has the external power jack and doubtless will run on the 13.8 Volts of a fully charged automotive electrical system. Using three dummy batteries and nine regular AA batteries would give 13.5 Volts. Is that what I should be feeding the rig? Another question is if these radios came with dummy batteries, what did they look like? I purchased my first C.B. walkie talkies from Radio Shack back about '80-'81 and the dummy batteries were plastic with a strip of copper running between the terminals. Lately I've gotten some dummy batteries that I assume are older because they are of all-metal construction. Not sure what kind of metal but it is lightweight and dull silver in color. Is that the type of dummy battery that originally came with the TRC-101B? Also, if anybody knows, what was the power out and receiver sensitivity of these radios? Thanks, Sean, KK4TS