Heartened by the weekend's experiments using solar power and the FT817, I thought it would be fun to try running a little more RF power. I hooked the Icom IC706 up to the batteries last night. I set the power to around 30 watts.
Propagation was reasonable on 20, 30 and 40m. I made a good few QSOs including a Ukrainian lighthouse station on 20m and two friends; Willy, LY2PX and Anders, SM3/EA8CN on 30m. It was fun explaining that I had a solar powered rig. No-one complained it was dark!
The hour's operating cost was around 0.3v, most of which had been replaced by the solar panel by the time I checked the battery voltage at 07.00 this morning.
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