At 06:22 PM 05/11/07, you wrote:
Hi All,
Does anyone know what charging current the Mastr II battery charger
/ battery revert option supplies to the batteries? Is using this a
good idea or a bad one? I highly doubt its a smart charger or has
a trickle function to float batteries. Im looking at using the
charger thats built into my power supply but im open to other
options as well.
Thanks
--Don
KD7WKF
Charger technology has advanced tremendously since the Mastr II and
equivalent Moto power supplies were designed.
I've seen a few sites where a modern automatic charger was put
on a good deep cycle battery bank, and a multipole relay switches
the repeater system from the Mastr II (or Micor) supply over to the
battery bank. The relay coil is simply hooked to the power line
so the system switches over to the battery when power fails.
An extra pole on the relay tells the repeater controller to go into
power fail mode...
Some of the battery revert options out there are really pretty poor.
Astron has a battery backup option (the "BB" option) on some of
their larger supplies. It consists of two big diodes (they use two
in parallel for each and a single 5 ohm resistor (their "charger")....
Their charger is a recipe for a cooked battery.
Compare the RS-50M schematic at
<http://www.repeater-builder.com/astron/astron-rs50m.jpg> and
the RS-50M-BB schematic at
<http://www.repeater-builder.com/astron/astron-rm50a-bb.jpg>
if you don't believe me.
It's much more cost effective to buy an RS-50M and your own
diodes, hook up a battery and your own top quality automatic
charger.
Mike WA6ILQ
