I have a site which seems to be at the bottom of Idaho Power's to-do list when it comes to outages. The last "major" service interruption for for 8 days.
Previously, our repeater was piggybacked on a commercial user's battery back up which gave us working power for about 3 days (duty cycle on the commercial gear was much higher than our equipment). That company has since gone belly up and removed their equipment and back up power leaving us with nothing but AC to rely upon. I've inherited several dozen Gel Cell batteries previously in use for CATV line equipment power supplies. These are rated at 85-90 amp hour. Our plan in the spring is to put 10 of these up on the site for roughly an 800 amp hour array, with plans to go up from there. The vast majority of the Ham plans I've seen on the web are designed for 7-12 amp hour Gel Cell charging at a rate of less than 1 amp. Is there an a relatively inexpensive method of charging these batteries without completely breaking the bank? I know in a recent conversation here on RB, one of the users had a Solar Charge Controller inline between his 12 volt power supply (in our case a GE Mastr II 30 amp supply) and the actual repeater equipment. Any *useful* information is much appreciated HI HI :) 73s, AJ, K6LOR
