As you must know from my constant excitement, a TH & Atu is coming. I have a unique situation and I was wondering what everyone thinks. What if...
As you must know from my constant excitement, a TH & Atu is coming. I have a unique situation and I was wondering what everyone thinks. What if...
Instead of using a 30 foot cable to feed the ATU, what if I install the TH unit in a box on a pole and fed it with a short, say 3 foot coax to an ATU mounted on the same pole. Power & audio thru Belden cable 50 feet or so... or thru a solar panel and 5.8 receiver.
Think the shorter line would improve coverage area? How much less line loss would it recover? What type of cable would be best?
I think outside mounting everything is doable. Water proofing the TH indoor unit could prove problematic. Might want to confirm operating temperature ranges on the unit and determine if air cooling (fan) will be necessary and adequate.
The coax should be fine. The radio engineers and novice engineers should comment on the coax. I've always thought coax to provide loss, but unsure how it may or may not enhance AM transmit.
Power and audio can be accomplished over an outdoor ethernet cable. I use gel filled burial grade ethernet cable. Should be able to pump power over the ethernet on the spare pairs (assuming you aren't using gigabit). Alternatively, can buy an official POE injector.
Assuming the 5.8 receiver is to get signal/data to the antenna stack? Doable there.
Need to determine the watt consumption on these pieces prior to considering solar. My guess is you need upwards of a 100 watt panel if this is 24/7 operation.
Feel free to ask whatever. Glad to help with these off grid and tech style installs.
I have a 20 watt panel... probably wot be enough.... but we'll see...
Well 20 watt mounted with a 40-50 degree angle should get 4 hours of usable sun per day.
That's 80 watts on clear days. Do you get many of those where you are?
I have yet to get a real watt power draw number on a Talking House unit. I'd guess that it ends up in 2-5 watt power draw. The ATU is passive with no power required.
To run the Talking House based on this 24 hours a day you would need:
2 watts x 24 hours = 48 watt hours
5 watts x 24 hours = 120 watt hours
The 2 watt low end is able to be ran from the 20 watt panel with excess of 32 watt hours thrown into battery, minus inherent losses with solar and batteries. Which in real world is revised downward like this:
20 watt solar panel = 15 watts
15 watts x 4 hours = 60 watt hours
60 watt hours is real tight on the 2 watt low end end. Only sticking a maximum of 12 watt hours above use into the batteries, which isn't going to make batteries happy.
On the high end your 20 watt panel produces about 50% of what you need at 5 watt sustained power draw.
So the choices here are really to first get a real wattage consumption figure for the Talking House unit you have on order. This can be done with a Kill-a-Watt unit which is cheap and plug and play (we all should have one or similar in our testing gear).
Beyond that, once you confirm power number, you can choose to run less hours like daylight only (which is very common in AM band). That should proportionally reduce your consumption.
2 watts x 12 hours = 24 watt hours
5 watts x 12 hours = 60 watt hours
With the 2 watt draw, running 12 hours a day, it would be possible to run this transmitter for 2 days without total discharge (of course depends on your battery which should be total draw for a day multiplied by say 5 -- 24 watt hours @ 12V = 2AH of battery 60 watt hours @ 12V = 5AH of battery... So 10AH or 25AH of battery.
The whole idea of the TH with the ATU is to keep the TH indoors. It isn't exactly the ideal transmitter otherwise. Both the ProCaster and the Rangemaster do better jobs all around, both in terms of allowing asymmetric modulation and sonically.
I'd just keep the TH unit indoors - much easier.
I don't think you're going to get much loss over the coax, in any event, particularly with the relatively short lengths involved and the frequencies you're operating at.
The INFOSPOT is setup as you have suggested.
The I AM Radio(Talking House) transmitter is in a box with some audio support equipment, the ATU in another box with the whip antenna mounted on the box.
The whole system mounts outside on a pole putting the transmitter within reach and the ATU elevated.