I have decided to run field day as a 5 watt battery station using my K3,
BL2 Balun, 44 ft doublet fed with 22 ft of window line, an old tandy DOS
computer for logging, a home brew white LED lamp and a 105 amp hour RV
battery. I measure K3 rec at 1.06A. K3 TX at 3.15A, LCD lamp at .10A,
DOS computer at 0.3A normal or 0.7A during disk operation. If I
transmitted 10% of the time, never took any kind of a break and went for
24 hours I could use a maximum of 40 AH. Reality is I will eat, go to
the rest room and sleep about 4 hours so if I shut things down during
that time I will probably come out closer to 35 AH.
I ran some tests on the BL2 on 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters into my 44 ft
doublet. I applied a 100 watt carrier from the K3 for 1 minute on each
band while the bands were dead and could not feel any sign of the BL2
getting even a little bit warm. It seemed to stay right at room
temperature. I feel it will must be efficient because if I can't feel
heat than it can't be causing loss.
I looked into solar charging for this field day as I would have liked
the 100 point bonus but I also wanted to meet the spirit of the bonus
which meant I wanted the solar to do a good job of replacing the power I
would use. I did not feel $500 to do this was practical and even just a
part of what I use would be $100. I can get enough energy from the power
grid to recharge the battery for about $0.20 or I could run my old
Homelite 600 watt generator long enough to charge the batter for about
$5.00. If I wanted to run field day at 100 watts on the generator for 24
hours it would cost about $20.00 for the gas for the Homelite. I will
skip the solar power bonus and just use up about a third of my large
battery.
I have a K2 and an IC-746PRO but the K3 is so much better for field day
that I want to use it. The IC-746PRO will not run on a discharging
battery and under busy contest conditions the receiver does not work
near as well as the K3. The K2 works well and I have use it for 4 field
days but the K3 has much better IF filters, much better noise fighting
features, and for the 30 to 45 WPM stations it even helps me copy the
information. I will be able drop back to my DOS laptop on the battery
for logging and dupe checking, which I feel helps meet the spirit of QRP
BATTERY, instead of using MIXW and having to run the Windows lap top on
AC..
I wrote a nice DOS logging/duping program compiled in quick basic
several years ago. If anyone wants it just drop me a line and I will
send it as a attachment to an E-Mail.
Hope to work all of you 1B ND.
73 for now
Kenneth A. Christiansen
W0CZ
[EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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