It's all aliexpress. Liitokala batteries and the BMS just looked nice
Yes, it is quite heavy. Not for light trekking.
Yes a 32Ah 4s lifepo4. Fantastic battery. I can run full power for hours
I have a master switch on the power cable before the fuses even. I lost a couple of expensive lipo batteries when I forgot to disconnect them and put the radios away for a few months.
I looked at the spec sheet and it seems that just taping the cells together like that should provide necessary support for all but the outer sides.
A clamp wouldn't hurt, but probably give me negligible benefits in the projected lifetime of this pack. I'm not using this very often so the pack will age out before charge wear will be an issue. Say I get 300 charge cycles over 10 years, that would be heavy use for my radio pack.
Didn't have N connectors. They're so fiddly to solder. And rg58 is what I have so that is what I use.
It's an IC7000, so it can do 100w on HF. I will use various antennas. But all of them built from bits and pieces in the garage. Mostly eflw, dipols or verticals I think.
13.8v is the charging voltage of lead acid batteries. So it stuck.
That's a ic-7000 and it does 100w out on hf.
A fan or two into that gap below the radio is one of the improvements on the block. Together with a voltmeter for the battery.
Don't know about any pressure. They are charged up and working right now
Redneck engineering manpack
An ice fishing box to house my ic-7000, an atu, a battery pack. Very crude but solid rack made of pine board I had laying around. This is cobbling of the best sort.
My new pota battery, 32ah 4s lifepo4
Should be able to power my ic-7000 for almost 2 hours of continuous tx at 100w. Now to install it in my POTA pack.
The urge to just get one more radio
I'm vacationing in Japan at the moment, visiting relatives. It is sweltering so we stay mostly indoors, but I have been a couple of trips to akihabara. Initially I only meant to buy a used ic-7100 this year, but then of course I also needed a new psu, so alinco was it. After a couple of days I realize that an brand spanking new ic-7300 was half price compared to home (provided I manage to avoid VAT coming home) so I bought one. And now I of course need a new antenna for all this fancy new equipment..... It snowballs.
I know I'll have to do mars mod on the radios. No trouble. That's easy.
Actually my main worry is my baggage allotment when flying back home.
For 6m perhaps just making a 2e yagi is simpler since you'll only save a trivial amount of width with a moxon.
Making yagi antennas
I've been apprehensive about building my own yagi antennas before. It seemed so complicated. But then I started tinkering with antenna modelling software and decided it couldn't be that difficult. So I started building.
Life was so much easier when I realised that with a gamma match I did not have to split or isolate the elements from the boom.
On the pic is my 6m5el and my 2m5el yagis. 6m is a lot of fun this summer. There's a 10m/20m moxon spider beam coming up next.