Portable power purchase
I recently bought a power station, not the one at Fitzroy, or Darlington, but a battery packaged with an inverter and DC-DC converter. It’s called the Ecoflow River2, a Black Friday / Cyber Monday deal that I couldn’t resist..
Surprise number one: The specs say it is good for 100W / 8A at a nominal 12VDC, but 300W from the AC outlets. It turns out that buried in the bottom of the thing is a Lithium battery with 8, rather than the usual 4 cells. They don’t mention that in any of their advertising, but show a few cartoon drawings of the guts (and yes, of course I took the lid off to take a peek, but couldn’t even see the battery from the top).
To check it out, I had it boil some water for me, using a 300W 120V immersion heater. It drained the battery after about a liter and a half, so it does what it says it can.
Surprise number two: My daily driver HF rig (IC 7200) is a pig for current. It takes 2A, about 24W just to run the receiver. I knew that already. Turn on the transmitter, and things really start to cook. At 5W out, it eats 8A, meaning that if I wanted to use the DC port on my power station, I could only run QRP with this rig.
At 50W out, it takes 15A to make it talk. To do this, I need to use the 120V inverter in it, followed by my switching power supply, all to go from 24VDC to 120VAC to 12VDC. After all that, it takes over 280W out of the battery for every dit sent.
At 100W out, it is past the continuous power spec for the new toy. The switcher drops from 13.8V down to 13V, struggling heroically to contend with an input voltage that drops to 90VAC, while the power station pushes 340W out of the battery. It’s supposed to be good for 600W for short bursts.
The moral of that story is that if you want to do QRP in the field, don’t take your at-home rig with you. Find something lighter and less power hungry for that job, even if the receiver isn’t the best.
Contest conundrum …
After missing the ARRL 160, I at least got a bit of time in on the 10m contest. Unlike the bad old days of the bottom of the solar cycle, the band was open from before you’d expect, till long after. I sighed every time I went within earshot of the receiver with arms full of something else that had to get done. Whether you are in the chair for as long as a binge watching TV addict, or just nip in and out for a single QSO at a time, its fun to see what you can come up with, and on 10m you can have fun without an antenna farm out back. Even a cliff dweller can make themselves heard there. Now I just have to get around to submitting a log. No hope of any placing in the top 100, but it is nice to show activity.
That’s it for now. Have a great holiday, no matter how you slice it. See you in the Canada Winter Contest.
73
mk
VE3FFK
Last Updated on 2023-12-17 by AdminOARC