Battery Power for Your Handheld Transceiver

Training Tip for 12-07-2005

Tonight’s training tip is about emergency power for your handheld. If you’re going to be

useful in a communications emergency, you’re going to need some basic gear: a radio,

an antenna, and a source of power. Most of us have and will use our handheld radios for

VHF or VHF/UHF communications. They’re portable, low-power stations that are versatile

marvels of technological capability these days. They’re indispensable in an emergency

situation for short-range simplex operation and for longer-range communications through an

operational repeater.

Having a handheld radio is of little use, however, if you don’t have a long-term source

of power for it. For most of us, the standard source of power is a stock battery pack,

usually a re-chargeable nicad or nickel-metal-hydride battery. We charge it when

it’s low, and we don’t think much about it any other time.

But during a communications emergency, there’s high probability of a power outage, too.

We saw that in the recent hurricanes that devastated the southeast. Your fully charged

standard battery will last only a few hours, depending on how much transmitting you do

and at what power level. What do you plan to do after the battery is discharged and

you have no power available for charging it? Or even if you do have power, it will take

some time – usually several hours – to recharge it. What’s your back-up plan to get

right back on the air?

There are several possibilities. You could carry spare rechargeable battery packs. That

can get expensive, and you still need a way of charging them eventually. If the emergency

lasts more than a day or so, you’re probably out of luck. If you have access to a 12-volt

car battery, you could operate your handheld directly from that, if you had the

appropriate cable. That would keep you on the air but it would limit your portability, and

if you didn’t have an external antenna, operating a handheld from inside a car is not

usually effective. You could charge your handheld battery from a car battery, too, but it’s

still not the ideal situation and what if you don’t have access to the car battery for very

long or not at all? What then?

The best plan is to have a large supply of AA alkaline cells in your go-kit. Yes, AA

alkaline cells. These are easily acquired and they’re cheap. A pack of 36 AA cells goes

for around $13. They have a long shelf life and don’t self-discharge. They provide more

voltage than nicad or nickel-metal-hydride cells. And they’re disposable; you don’t need

to worry about recharging them.

You need to acquire a battery holder suitable for your radio, and most makes and models

have an alkaline battery holder available as an optional accessory. If you don’t have one

or two, don’t delay; order a couple of them today. They’re usually very inexpensive –

typically 12 to 25 dollars or so. Put fresh cells in them and put them in your go-kit. Make

sure you check them periodically to be sure they’re ok; you don’t want to find them dead

or leaking when you really need them.

Having lots of AA cells in your go-kit means that you can use them for other applications

as well, such as flashlights, GPS, cameras, or other gear. And you’ll have them available

for your fellow hams who forgot to include them in their go-kits or who had a few but ran

out of them.

So act today. Get one or better yet two AA alkaline battery holders for your handheld.

Get a large supply of AA alkaline cells and keep them ready to go. I have a Yaesu

FT-411e 2M handheld with a rechargeable nicad pack and an alkaline pack that takes

6 AA cells. It takes just a few seconds to change alkaline cells when I need to. And that

pack of 36 AA cells I bought from Home Depot will provide enough cells for 6 batteries,

which should last for a couple of days if I’m careful to use low power, limit my transmit

time, and turn off the radio when it’s not needed. So be prepared and like the Eveready

bunny, you too will keep going and going and going…