Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Today I want to raise the topic of batteries. Specifically, sizing the battery. You can do as I did naively, look at the manual, see that the current consumption of your radio is 22 Amp, decide that this means that you need to get a 26 Ah battery to use your radio for 1 hour. Being the portable type, I got two, 52 Ah in total. Some time has passed since I made that purchase. I've learned that I can get a lot more out of my battery than 2 hours. I also learned that lugging 56 Ah around is not fun. Having learned this, what could I have done to improve? Well, first of all, the 22 Amp is for Transmit. According to the manual, on receive it's only using 1 Amp. If you're not transmitting all the time, then you're not drawing 22 Amp the whole time. The ratio between send and receive is the Duty Cycle, often expressed as a percentage of the time spent transmitting. Another thing to note is that 22 Amp is when you use full power for a particular mode and band combination. On my radi