I ran a solar powered off-grid portable op today.
Equipment:
Yaesu FT-818ND
USB SignaLink
FTDI CT-62 CAT cable from Valley Enterprises
2014 Dell Laptop
Duracell 9ah AGM battery
Hardened Power BattBac
Harbor Freight 100watt solar power kit
N9TAX roll-up 2M/70CM Slim Jim antenna
Operated 2M voice into WF4X (147.285) repeater in Defuniak Springs. QSOs with K4NDJ and KK4WDR.
Operated JS8 at 5 and 1 watt. QSO with KK4WDR at fast mode, we tried turbo but I had some bad decodes. Distance was about 35 miles and we had good decodes with signals at -12 SNR. Grid square I activated was EM60vs.
Things learned today:
The bad
- Bring stuff to get HF wire antennas in the air, not all campsites have trees. I planned to get on JS8 and Winlink on 40m.
- Just because your computer worked on JS8 3 months ago doesn’t mean it’s gonna work as soon as you wire everything up. CAT control wouldn’t come up and took some tweaking. A notebook with settings recorded in it would help with the trial and error.
The good:
- 100 watt solar into a 9ah battery runs everything but won’t sustain operations overnight. It’ll run everything about 2 hours on battery.
- 12v Laptop power supply works well on this setup but the laptop consumes a lot of power.
Next operation will be using a raspberry pi as the computer and an iPad as the display connected via VNC.
