" Many folks use a marine battery and a trickle charger. This not only
gives
them plenty of power for the shack, but it keeps them on the air when the
lights go out. You need to take care about ventilation and battery
leakage,
but I don't know anyone who has done this and ever thought about going to
a
commercial supply. I'm pretty happy with my Astron, but when the lights
go
out, I'm limited to my HT.
==================================
A marine battery is fine ,simple and reliable . However if 'trickle charger
' is really a trickle charger ,when operating on FM (with full carrier) the
voltage when battery was fully charged might drop from say 13.8 to 12.8 V
,with battery still being 80 % charged. This means the power input and hence
RF ouput will probably be less than the transceiver's rated power
..............although that probably won't matter much signal wise.
If the transceiver is multimode and when operated on SSB ,the average
current on transmit will be lower resulting in an average output voltage
much closer to 13.8 Volt., even when using a trickle charger.


Frank GM0CSZ / KN6WH

"Highland Ham" wrote in message
...

A marine battery is fine ,simple and reliable . However if 'trickle
charger
' is really a trickle charger ,when operating on FM (with full carrier)
the
voltage when battery was fully charged might drop from say 13.8 to 12.8 V
,with battery still being 80 % charged. This means the power input and
hence
RF ouput will probably be less than the transceiver's rated power

You make a good point, Frank. A couple of years ago I bought a relatively
cheap battery charger (for the car, not for the radio), and was surprised at
what microprocessors have done to these things. Float charging, which is
basically what you want, is available from these things pretty commonly now,
as well as a myriad of other features. I guess the engineers put a $2 PIC
into one of these things and now they got to make excuses to use it. They
can't charge a lot less than the next guy so they need to out-feature them.
Anyway, the modern automotive battery charger has all nature of features.
It has become another of these devices with an impenetrable manual!

...