02/20/10

100220 - Well - I've been a little remiss in keeping the web site updated.  I will get some pictures in here tomorrow or Monday.  This is a status update.

Jeff moved his equipment in there a week or so ago.  I moved my new gear in there yesterday.  I spent a good chunk of today operating from there - both as VG7G and VE7XS.  I now have my Flex 5000A, SPE 1K Expert amplifier, and peripheral equipment located down there.  We have dipole antennas up for 20, 40 and 80 Meters.  We also have a G5RV up, and a triple band dipole.  We have put together two yagis, neither of which is operating as planned (not resonant on the frequencies we want).  We picked up the Big Yellow tower from the Surrey club (thanks for the loan) today.  We will try and install it tomorrow and get either a tri-band or mono-band yagi working on it.  With any luck, we'll also get one of the other yagis fixed as well.

Heat is in - nice, dry propane heat - leave the shack at 55 F, and it comes up to 70 F very quickly.  We have two full operating positions working.  

In service, we have a Pro-Sine 3KW Pure Sine Wave inverter, running off of almost 900 amp hours of 24 volt batteries (GNB Sealed Lead Acid batteries) in an air tight box vented to the outside through the floor.  In addition, we have three SLA 155 amp hour batteries under my workstation, providing 12 volts to my workstation.  We have two EU2000 Honda generators providing temporary power as required.  There is 880 amp hours of 12 volt liquid ni-cads that haven't been brought into production yet - more work required.

We have a propane 2.5 KW generator ready to install - maybe tomorrow if we can get things organized well enough.  This will be a remote start, from inside the shack.  Eventually, I will tie this into the Pro-Sine 3.0 Inverter, and it will automatically start as required.  I ran the shack today on and off for about 4 hours, without running the generator.  I was running up to 1 KW into the dipoles, and racked up about 70 contacts.  I did a lot of rag chewing, so fairly high demand on the environment.  After we picked up the mobile tower, I ran the generator, and the battery banks were almost fully charged after an hour or so.

Big Al (VA7MP), finally embarrassed me into fixing the mobile radio problem in my car.  Thanks Al - I appreciate the push, and the help!  So I have new fancy fuses in my car wiring.  I'll take some pictures and share them up shortly.

Having the station run completely off of batteries works really well.  When you unlock the containers, you face a wall, and it has a door and a regular door lock on it.  As you step into the containers, it is looking more and more like regular office space than the inside of two shipping containers.  There are wall light switches inside the cans.  If they are painted red, they are on 'emergency' power, and will work even when the generator is not running.  It takes about four seconds for the Inverter to sense a load, and then it turns on.  There are also plugs inside the cans that are painted red - they operate in the same manner, they work even if the generator isn't on.

The intent was that you could run the stations completely off of the grid - for a protracted period of time.  The kitchen is not yet completed, but we have a counter top that we can use.  There is a propane and butane stove down there, and we have an  electronic coffee pot.  We have not installed the composting toilet yet, on the list, but hasn't been done.