I promised quite a number of people that I would let them know about the status of a couple of products in the Micro-Trak Line. Many of the Micro-Trak products had to be redesigned due to parts becoming extinct. Apparently there was a flu or something going around, and certain parts manufacturers went belly-up, made undocumented changes to the their parts, or just raised the prices. In the case of some amplifiers the parts increased by 500%! This caused us to pull a number of our products until we could obtain new parts, or acquire the current parts inexpensively enough to build the products at a price point that is not awful.
The RTG-50 ( Originally called the "BFT"-50) is in production, but with somewhat reduced power. The new version, identical in almost all other respects to the old version, uses a different amplifier module, and has an output power of between 30-40 Watts, depending on your power supply voltage. With an alternator running at 14 Volts, it will typically produce 40 Watts, but we are calling it the RTG-30 so as to not appear like the CHICOM Walkie-Talkie people who claim handhelds with 25 Watts output. I have already sent Byon a number of these, and I expect he will put it back on the Byonics webstore shortly. The firmware and the configuration software are the same as before. Like the last generation of RTG-50's, these RTG-30's have thermostats that will shut off the amplifier if they reach 50C. ( Still, try to remember to turn off the tracker when you remove your antenna)?
The reboot of the? MT-AIO is in the works too. One of the reasons that it disappeared was that Pelican, after about a hundred yeas making the same stuff, decided to drop the Yellow case we have used for the last decade. We redesigned the unit fit in another manufacturers case, whereupon they dropped the whole family of cases from production ( Flambeau, "Black Ribbon" cases)?
I found a case that I liked a few months ago, and have been quietly working on a next-gen version of the MT-AIO. The prototype is smaller and lighter, and works well. Since a whole new? generations of Hams has come on to the scene, I decided to rethink a lot of the design elements. Like Neanderthal Man, we had built the unit around running on alkaline batteries. With Alkaline batteries, the output voltage decays with operating time. I decided to plan this unit around operating with four, 18650 LiPo batteries. With protected 18650 batteries (These have a built-in little circuit to protect the batteries from going up like Hiroshima, and not catch fire when charging) the limitations on supply current cap the unit at about 12 Watts output. With unprotected batteries, the unit runs at about 20 Watts initially, tapering to about 16 Watts before the batteries run out. LiPO's run more or less flat until they are discharged completely, and then just stop working. In bench testing, where I have the limitation of no view of the sky, the unit ran about four days, with the standard two minute transmission interval, and "sleeping" the GPS between transmissions. It will do better of course if its outside and has a view of the sky. Like most of the Micro-Trak APRS transmitters, the output power is trimmer-pot adjustable. At any rate, I have the first run of boards being run now, and hope to have saleable products in Byon's capable hands soon. I will put up photos of the new production units as soon as I put one together.
73,
Allen AF6OF
VHS/BYONICS
