Eric Tweet
Active Member
Ok, maybe there is a battery, but it's a nifty enough setup to warrant the title.
The following may not be up everyone's alley, but it's worked exceptionally well for what I need.
Much of my work involves commuting on small planes to small villages and cramming 8 hours worth of work into a 6 hour day trip. That calls for a UHF setup, and a battery that I can rely on to work well, is quick to set up, and is as light as possible. Needless to say, long gone are my days of lugging around a lead-acid battery and hoping I haven't drawn it down past 50% DOD, thus unknowingly ruining it and only finding out by having battery problems in the middle of nowhere when I though everything was fine.
Enter the Blue Bricks - LiFePO4 cells. These can be stacked in series to achieve whatever voltage is needed, typically 14 volts for a UHF setup. And they come in a variety of capacities to suit all sorts of needs. They're better than lead-acid for a base setup in about a zillion ways. They can safely be cycled something like 2,000 times to 100% DOD (or about 4,500 at 80%), they're 3-5x lighter than lead-acid, have higher energy density, are more stable and forgiving than Li-Ion, etc. Just about all Javad equipment can be plugged directly into a 14v pack in the same way you'd hook up a lead-acid battery (check your equipment specs, first!). They charge fast, and provide longer run times than a lead-acid of similar dimensions. If that's not enough, the discharge voltage curve is incredibly flat, meaning you get almost a constant voltage throughout the entire discharge cycle.
In addition to that, the battery management system (BMS) of a LiFePO4 pack means that it is protected against over-charging, over-discharging, and over-heating. It'll just disconnect itself under any of those conditions - no more guessing if you should swap batteries, or if you're going to do damage to your lead-acid by using it an extra hour even though it appears to be working fine.
So it becomes easy to see why this sort of thing might come in handy.
A person could even get a bit clever with their storage, transportation, and field configuration of this kind of battery, as can be seen below.
Where's the battery?
Oh... there it is! Out of sight, out of the rain, and out of all kinds of harm's way. Always ready to haul around and hook up quick, wherever the equipment case goes.
(still a prototype, pardon the rat's nest!)
The following may not be up everyone's alley, but it's worked exceptionally well for what I need.
Much of my work involves commuting on small planes to small villages and cramming 8 hours worth of work into a 6 hour day trip. That calls for a UHF setup, and a battery that I can rely on to work well, is quick to set up, and is as light as possible. Needless to say, long gone are my days of lugging around a lead-acid battery and hoping I haven't drawn it down past 50% DOD, thus unknowingly ruining it and only finding out by having battery problems in the middle of nowhere when I though everything was fine.
Enter the Blue Bricks - LiFePO4 cells. These can be stacked in series to achieve whatever voltage is needed, typically 14 volts for a UHF setup. And they come in a variety of capacities to suit all sorts of needs. They're better than lead-acid for a base setup in about a zillion ways. They can safely be cycled something like 2,000 times to 100% DOD (or about 4,500 at 80%), they're 3-5x lighter than lead-acid, have higher energy density, are more stable and forgiving than Li-Ion, etc. Just about all Javad equipment can be plugged directly into a 14v pack in the same way you'd hook up a lead-acid battery (check your equipment specs, first!). They charge fast, and provide longer run times than a lead-acid of similar dimensions. If that's not enough, the discharge voltage curve is incredibly flat, meaning you get almost a constant voltage throughout the entire discharge cycle.
In addition to that, the battery management system (BMS) of a LiFePO4 pack means that it is protected against over-charging, over-discharging, and over-heating. It'll just disconnect itself under any of those conditions - no more guessing if you should swap batteries, or if you're going to do damage to your lead-acid by using it an extra hour even though it appears to be working fine.
So it becomes easy to see why this sort of thing might come in handy.
A person could even get a bit clever with their storage, transportation, and field configuration of this kind of battery, as can be seen below.
Where's the battery?
Oh... there it is! Out of sight, out of the rain, and out of all kinds of harm's way. Always ready to haul around and hook up quick, wherever the equipment case goes.
(still a prototype, pardon the rat's nest!)
