Corey, thanks for the Spartan suggestion. I'll check out Mike's review - I watch a lot of his stuff. I'm a little put off by their inclusion of at best 18ga wire with the "100A" unit, so I wonder what the terminals are capable of. At least the Powerwerx "small" unit comes with 12ga wire, and you don't have to wire up the shunt yourself. Still, I'll look at it.
Mark, I don't think the Miady batteries come with a solar charge controller. Jeremiah - N0KMO told me this as well, but there's nothing in the spec sheets indicating that such is the case. I'm sure it has a battery management board inside the case, but with a specified charge voltage of 14.6VDC, I wouldn't hook direct to a solar panel output. If your portable panel has regulated 14.4V out, that's cool. Yeah, I think it'd be very difficult to get a PWM unit to be radio quiet - just the nature of the beast. I suppose it's be possible to manage the pulse frequency to keep it away from the ham bands, but even there, a square wave, harmonically, is a combination of a bunch of sine waves of different frequencies, so, that's a tough job. With a good PWM controller, running off the "LOAD" terminals and not hooked to the battery, with good shielding and filtering, that's got a better chance.
I have the Powerwerx https://powerwerx.com/mppt-150w-solar-charge-controller charge controller. It's MPPT, so I'm expecting it to be quiet. Guess I'll find out. So, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a more expensive unit.
Hmm, looking again, I see I need to be careful when using that solar charge controller, and not plug it into the barrel jack, but rather into the 2nd Powerpole connector, since that barrel jack can't take 10A for sure. I sized that based on the AC LifePo4 charger I got for home charging.
