Mark Conrad wrote:

For example, on a totally different subject, namely
computers, I have always chosen battery-powered units,
even though they are inferior in performance.

I expect the same stupid choice will "win out" when I
finally choose a ham rig. sigh

You are in luck. Tubes are no longer used in modern rigs except for power
amplifiers. If you stay with anything made since 1980 and 100 watts or less,
it should take 13.8 volts DC.

Some rigs used 24 volt front ends and finals to get more gain with less
noise, but they are fairly rare.

The question is how much DC are you willing to put into your radio? If you
look at a 100 watt rig, it's going to need around 20 amps of DC to transmit
at full power. That kind of limits how you power it. Note that some rigs
use far less than others in receive mode, but at a 20:1 or 10:1 ratio it
does not matter a lot.

I.e. if you radio uses 1 amp on standby, then it uses the equivalent of
20 hours of reception for one hour of transmit time.
Lower power rigs use more proportionaly for standby because they use less
for transmit.

If you really want to conserve battery life, look at something like an old
Ten-Tec Argonaut (the 505,509,515) or the MFJ 90 series (9020, 9040, etc),
which have no microprocessor, no digital synthesythesior (pardon the bad
spelling), no led or lcd display, etc.

They put out 2-3 watts which is more than enough for CW, and will "work
the world" on SSB if the band is open and uncrowded. Forcing a signal
through a "closed" band or the middle of a pileup requires 1kw output radio,
if you hope for success and that is not going to run off a battery.

For a 1kw radio, consider a generator. I am a fan of gas grills, and therefore
think that a propane generator would be a good idea. I also am comfortable
with propane (or in my case propane/butane mixture) tanks around the house
but am not comfortable with gasoline or kerosene (diesel fuel). But then
I live in a big city.




Makes me wonder, when scientists fnally get around to
duplicating a flesh-and-blood human as an artificial
hardware item, and we download our brain into the
"artificial human" - - - will we make the same mistake
by downloading all our emotions also. g

You should watch the first and last episodes of the re-imagined Battlestar
Galactica that was on the Sci-Fi channel.

Geoff.

--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge or
understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the situation.
i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found in the Wikipedia.