At 12:34 PM 5/8/99 , you wrote:
Also since my #1 concern is power consumption. How much current does the
micor draw idling?
You know, if you wanted to do some engineering of a circuit, you could make
the repeater go to "sleep" periodically to save power.
Pagers have been doing this for years. The receiver "wakes up"
periodically to see if there is a signal on its frequency. This happens
very rapidly, but the battery savings is substantial. If you were able to
shut down the entire repeater (including controller) and wake up the
receiver with an external timing circuit every 1 second for 100
milliseconds, you would have a power savings of 90% (less the current of
the timing circuit). Upon receiving a signal, the receiver would then turn
on the repeater and not go to sleep for maybe 10 minutes. BTW, some of the
new HT's use this "sleep" technique to save power.
Just a thought....
Joe, K1iKE
