Portable power for SM?

Hi all,

I am interested to know what people are using to provide
portable power to SM units while doing roof testing, etc.

thanks Miles

We use a 12VDC to 120VAC power inverter with a long extension cord. Seems kind of primative but it works for us.

tjizzle wrote:
We use a 12VDC to 120VAC power inverter with a long extension cord. Seems kind of primative but it works for us.


We have been using BB Batteries (Model: BP1.2-12 - http://www.bb-battery.com/BP1.2-12.PDF) 12v batteries. We sacrificed a Canopy power supply and put crimp connectors on the ends to connect to the battery. It has worked flawlessly since Canopy has come out.

FYI, we also use a PDA with an ethernet flash card to test with. Using tone just isn't that reliable when aligning, and calling back to the shop for signal strength and link tests is a waste of co-worker's time.

I use the firewire port on my ibook.
Details are here:
http://web.abnormal.com/~thogard/canopy/firewire.shtml

I used to use a 12 gel-cell battery that came out of something but I’ve used car power, batteries for a drill. Anything thats more than about 7.5V and less than 30 should work fine.

I currently just use a portable APC 725 UPS. I sounds a bit silly, but it’s not very heavy, pretty portable, and lasts about 2-3 hours.

I was in the mood for building, so I made a 24 volt battery box
out of parts from a local supply store.
I added a charge / run switch. in the Run mode the output cable
suplies 24 volts @ 1.2 ah, and in the charge mode the box can be recharged
via a 12 volt nicad charger.


Miles

At Radio Shack they sell… r/c car battery pack… Ni-cd 9.6… take a Moto powerinjector and cut and splice the battery pack connector $1.95 to the injector end… we are able to get about 2 hours out of it… which is more than enough time to do a site survey… its rechargable… and lightweight.

:wink:

What we have been doing is using a 75’ stranded ethernet cable with an extension cord and power strip when we are setting up a shot at a customer’s site (for aiming only, prior to our intended network run). If we are just doing a site survey we utilize an automobile power inverter plugged into the 12v port of our vehicle (and the same extionsion cord). When we have needed to plug into a BH on a rooftop where no power is available (except remotely on another floor), we created a “pass-through” ethernet adapter very similar to the pigtail of the Canopy power supply. This works great!

a “pass-through” ethernet adapter??? what the H is that? I thought the topic was portable power supply, an extenstion cord with a power inverter is not that portable, thats a pain in the A.

Anyway, have tried the 12v battery, like the ones used in alarm systems, we have an electric company who is rigging us and old alarm panel to charge the batteries, this is going to be what we use, like the guy above.

it’s not a pain in the A at all. let’s say you are have radios on the rooftop of a building and your cmm is several floors below and you want to align your BH and you are the only one on site. in order to view your alignment page the BH must be powered (which is done by the cmm several floors below you)and you have your laptop/pda and need to login to the BH, the ‘passthrough cable’ (again, very similar to the pigtail of the canopy power supply) is attached to the etherenet port of your laptop/pda, the ethernet cable from the cmm and a patch cable to the BH. now your BH is powered and you can log in. Portable power - remote power, call it what you want. if you are doing a site survey for a customer install and need to power an SM to take a shot, my truck is portable, an extension cord is portable, what else do you need? why tote a battery around with you? personally, for site surveys, i would much rather use the power from my truck utilizing a power inverter, put the SM on a telescoping pole and take the shot. try using a surveyors pole (usually up to 35 feet), it’s fast and easy. job done 5-10 minutes.