DIGITAL CONNECTION
Sometimes you need to have your radio equipment located outdoors. Maybe the antenna site — especially on UHF — is too far from a building, or the site itself just doesn’t have any buildings. Putting equipment outdoors presents a few challenges we don’t often face, so this month we’ll take a closer look at some of the things that need to be considered.
What brought all this about was a discussion on the TARPN Group <https://groups.io/g/tarpn> about locating a TARPN node outdoors. This evolved into a discussion of emergency preparedness and battery power for home-based and remote nodes. It was this discussion that gave me the idea for this month’s column.
Outdoors
Our electronic equipment doesn’t happily lend itself to outdoor operation, particularly if exposed to the weather. Challenges include protection from the elements, insects, animals, thieves and vandals; electrical power, and thermal control. Some of these are more difficult than others, but we’ll have to deal with all of them in one way or another.
Big Power
The biggest challenge, and most of what we’ll discuss here, is electrical power. If there is a source of commercial power nearby to use, then the problem is almost trivial. Although reliably powering a complete station without commercial power is absolutely possible, it can be quite expensive. Before we look at ways to do this, let’s start with the simpler case, in which
