Good points Richard.
Not trying be a smart a$$, so please don't take this comment that way,
but what is the service worth to the community? SKYWARN, and up here in
Canada CANWARN, are valuable services that can save lives. Property can
be replaced, lives can't. Maybe there is some local, state or federal
money that could be tapped into or maybe even some private money for
that matter. Maybe suppliers would be willing to give the group a break
on pricing or even provide it at a substantial savings to the group. I
would go direct to the manufacturer.
Couple of thoughts on monitoring power outage.
- Some controllers have inputs that can be monitored and if a signal is
sensed it sets off an alarm. But a walwart could be plugged into the
main receptacle and connected to a controller input with some cleaned up
DC of course. In the event of a power failure, the controller would no
longer see the precense of the required voltage and notification could
be provided, hopefully spoken if that option is available, and a
designated person(s) could attend the site to check power. If you know
your runtime on the UPS, you know what your response time needs to be.
- I forgot that there was an IRLP computer at the site. In that case,
some UPS monitoring software will run on a unix/linux platform, there is
notification as well, as this software can advise you of outages, self
test results etc, etc by email. I am thinking here of the APC line, we
use them at our data centre for backup server power and in all of our
LAN closets for backup switch stack power.
I mentioned APC, I have nothing to do with APC, I have only used their
products and have always been pleased with the results.
Eric,
VA3EAM
Richard wrote:
It would have to be a very large, very high capacity UPS, in order to
handle the current the transmitters draw. This would be very
expensive. Maybe you could install a battery bank with a good quality
four stage charger to power the repeaters. When the power drops, since
the repeaters are already running on batteries, the switchover would
be seamless.
Your IRLP computer could be powered with a 1500 watt or better UPS.
This should allow sufficient runtime, plus the higher capacity should
get you out of the cheapo consumer grade UPS category. As Eric
suggests, you could plug the serial cable into the computer, and with
the right software, the node could monitor the battery voltage when it
is running on the UPS, then shut the computer down gracefully if the
voltage drops too low.
Richard
www.n7tgb.net <http://www.n7tgb.net/>
