21 September 2025
We’ll put some notes on battery testing here for now. First let’s go over our setup until we have a dedicated page for it.
We will move the overview to a more general page later.
The portable radio setup will cover two major systems:
Each comes with it’s own considerations, some of which are similar, and some of which are different. Current equipment limits us to mainly vehicular systems with limited manpack capabilities. This is due to the only radio available being an ICOM 7300, which is more of a “desktop” radio. Future improvements will come in the form of a QRP radio, namely the ICOM 705.
The choices one could make for each setup are very wide, and the choices made here by no means reflect a “best” option, simply one that suits my needs based on equipment I prefer. When designing systems, take your own requirements, needs, and equipment preferences/availability into consideration.
Many of the choices made here are simply results of my preference for widely available equipment with personal preference for user interface.
In our goal of creating a portable radio setup we’ll obviously need a power source. This power source should include the following features:
With each of the above applying to both a vehicular and manpack system, each requiring it’s own details.
My first choice is of course a battery since (unfortunately) we can’t take the walls with us. More specifically, a LiFePO4 battery because of their benefits. These include:
The main reason though centers around their increased safety and lifetime, which (for me) outweighs the benefit of lower size compared to other lithium ion battery choices. This is a subjective decision based on user preference and application requirements.
The current setup consists of the following.
The main company I’m using is Bioenno due to their known presence in the radio community, good customer support, and known quality products. Also, they’re based in the USA. Now, they don’t manufacture the cells in the USA (as far as I know at least), but they do claim to assemble the product in the USA, which is something I prefer. It also means their customer support will be easy to interact with for any US based users.
Note that the radio will change later, probably to an ICOM 705 due to its performance vs. weight. However, currently we only have a 7300 so we will make due.
The ICOM 7300 typically consumes around 0.9A to 1A during standby. Given the typical battery voltage to be in the 12.8 - 13.4 range during my tests, this means it only consumes around 13W.
One 12V 15Ah pack provides 180Wh of energy, meaning we can easily power the radio on standby mode (i.e. recieve only) for approximately 180Wh/13W = 13.85 hours, which is more than one should need for typical operations, especially when one accounts for the ability of the solar panel to easily produce enough power to allow radio functionality and battery charging during operation in a sunlit area.
With this setup, in theory and on a sunny day, one could operate the radio almost indefinitely due to the ability to charge and operate during sunny conditions, and the battery’s ability to easily operate on the radio overnight.
When considering a setup in a vehicle, this is a robust option as well, since the battery can easily be charged by the car during non-ideal weather and non-daylight hours.
The voltage over the operating range of a LiFePO4 battery is fairly stable. This means, unlike other batteries, the voltage is not a good indicator of the batteries’ state of charge (SoC). The best way to monitor the SoC for the LiFePO4 packs is to simply monitor the power consumption of the devices and the power put into the pack via charge controllers. By monitoring both of these power values we can get a good indicator of the SoC.
Monitoring both of these values simultaneous is not possible with more “simple” power monitors (since they only monitor power in one direction from my testing) however, a simple workaround is to either try to charge and discharge separately or to know your devices maximum power consumption, and monitor the charge power and time the devices’ operation to estimate power consumption and delivery.
We’ll get into a setup for monitoring both later, which simply involves more power meters, or a single power meter with multiple monitoring points to monitor the lines feeding into the battery, as well as those feeding the devices.
Later we’ll go into the design of a custom power monitoring solution by designing our own power monitoring PCB.