Today I brought my hand held VX-5 on my walk. Yes, I am trying to work myself up to a daily walk of at least 2km. I thought the battery was well charged, and all was fine just operating in stand-by. Having a local chat with the highest power level ... oops! Battery died. Maybe this is because the battery is fairly old. I am now going to check the state of the battery (Li-Ion type, 7.2V)
I may have to purchase a couple of spares, because it is a nice little radio. The standard battery is rated to 1100mAh.
For now, I am thinking of making a battery pack with 3 18650 Li-Ion cells and a cord/connector, just to be sure to have some spare capacity. This way I have can always have a fully charged battery, and I can change the cells when it goes too low. The cells are used, but tested cells with more than 2000mAh, so even with full power (5W) I should have enough juice for some local chatting. I **could** use lead acid batteries, but I don't want a hole in my pocket or rucksack after all those batteries are heavy as lead ;)
I have a good supply of Li-Ion cells and battery cassettes, so I expect to use those for several portable experiments, including going to local hills with the 10GHz WBFM experiments.
In China I found 2 solar chargers with a 3-cell (18650) battery casing, and including a BMS system, possibly fine for portable work.
At home I am slowly building some battery supply, charged mostly by solar panels, but in winter time it is probably necessary to add some juice from the mains power.
Initially this is intended for very low power equipment, such as a 28200 simple beacon receiver and some other simple monitor receivers that should run 24/7, and preferably also when mains supply fails, even if that does not happen often here.
For some of the computing the plan is to use some Raspberry Pi boards. The idea is using this for both WSPR/FT8 propagation monitoring and QRSS.
As usual, ideas a-plenty, now it is about making time to do something with them.
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