Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The transceiver you use to get on air and make noise needs power to operate. The traditional voltage for our amateur equipment is 13.8 Volts. Why not 12 Volts you ask. The short answer is chemistry, but let's move on, there is lots to cover. Generally that 13.8 Volt is specified with a +/- symbol and some percentage. For my radio it's 15%, which means that if I plug it into power that's somewhere between 11.7 Volt and 15.9 Volt, I'm good to go. Then when you look a little closer at the specification you'll see that my radio draws 22 Amp. That's a whole chunk of juice that needs to come from a power supply. Of course that means that you'll also need to deal with 22 Amp fuses, wire capable of dealing with 13.8 Volt at 22 Amp, and connectors that won't melt when you do that. If you look closer again, you might notice that 22 Amp is when you're using the radio at maximum power, that is, 100% duty cycle and 100% power, and only during transmit, in the case of my radio, 100 Watts fo