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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.
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