Ham Radio – Page 2

During the summer, I started purchasing components for a solar box (solar generator). I am hoping to achieve 2 goals with it:

Firstly, I wanted to have a solar charger that I can charge all of my devices with while camping. There are commercially available chargers available, but they cost a good amount, and don’t usually have a power source built in. There is also the question of durability of some of the charge solutions. They are fairly light, thin and compact too which is handy for hiking, but I envision this as staying put once I get where I’m going.

Secondly, I also want to set up an off-grid simplex repeater at some point in the future and this is the first step towards making that happen. The main point of it being off-grid being that it can power itself, of course.

Solar Box Testing A — Initial Testing. Able to charge a power bank via USB with no issues.

This kit consists of a battery, a solar charge controller, a 12V socket, and the box.

I used a 7 amp, 12 volt sealed lead acid battery. I could’ve went either larger or smaller in capacity, but the most cost efficient was the 7A. The charge controller is rated to 20A, which leaves me some space to add another battery to increase the total amperage of the kit. The 12V socket is a dual socket and should come in handy for powering whatever radio I eventually end up using in the repeater and anything else that needs to be powered up alongside that. Lastly, everything is housed in a plastic .30 cal. ammo box. The battery and 12V socket are fused to prevent bad things from happening. Dead equipment is not good.

A 25W solar panel is used to charge everything up. I went with this size because I want this to be running year round and there is usually less sun in the colder months and snow could also cause charging issues.

Solar Box Inside — A look at the guts. The charge controller readout will spike a bit higher than the panels max. output for a few seconds. Should only be reading ~1.4A max, not 1.6A.

The solar panel has a quick disconnect plug on it so I can pull everything apart for transport quickly. This ammo box is a temporary solution. This kit will eventually be built into a metal ammo can which will be necessary not only for durability in long-duration field conditions, but will also act as a ground plane for any antenna I decide to use for the repeater setup.

I was able to put some of my long-dormant electrical skills to use (if only some minor tinning and multimeter usage) with this project. The only thing I need to do now is to rig a switch to kill the power from the battery to the charge controller. As the panel has an LCD display, it does drain the battery if not in use.

Solar Box Under Sun — Doing it’s job under the sun.

Every once in a while, the International Space Station has an SSTV event. SSTV stands for Slow Scan Television. Essentially you’re receiving data as an audio stream from the station (similar to old dial-up modem sounds) and then you can convert that data into an image using a computer or smartphone. I used an app called Robot36 as the decoding app and another app called ISS Detector for determining when the station would be over my location.

I only found out about this event less than 24 hours before the end of it. Ran outside just as the ISS was sailing overhead last night and was able to receive image 8 of 12 (Apollo 8 50th anniversary) by holding my UV-5R’s speaker mic up to my phone running Robot36. As I had just downloaded the app a few minutes prior and didn’t have much of a chance to figure it out, I ended up losing the image when I closed the app (controls are a bit weird in the app).

I went outside again this morning ahead of when the ISS was supposed to be overhead. I managed to catch the tail end of image 4 and caught all of image 5, but again screwed that up. The app will auto-save the image at various times, but once it gets to the bottom of the screen, it will overwrite whatever came before it. So I ended up losing the top where it says NASA On The Air.

All in all, it was pretty fun.

Captured images are below:

Category: Ham Radio

Solar Box Project

ARISS/NOTA ISS Slow Scan TV Event Feb 8-10