This is the display on the charge controller. It shows "In 53.1V 1.8A" It is very early yet and the sun is low in the sky. You saw in the prior picture that there is still some shade on one of the panels. The batteries are still mostly charged but I talked to my friend John and several other stations Friday evening. John graciously called Andra for me and told her I was okay and that everything was going well. The controller is currently in the bulk charging phase as you can see in the lower right corner. It is charging the batteries at a rate of 6.5amps. In very short order the controller switched to the absorption phase and then the float stage. I was at maximum charge hours before the contest started.

I set up my tent close to the operating position. I wasn't sure if I had enough power with the three batteries to make it until the sun would again hit the panels on Sunday. I figured if the station went dead, I'd jump in the tent and try to get a few hours of shuteye. Many of you know that my laptop is not really a laptop. It is what is called a "desktop replacement." What that means is that it is a desktop computer in a laptop case. It has a desktop flame throwing processor and fans to cool it. It contains three hard drives and 32GB of memory. It takes so much power that just sitting idle the battery will only last about 45 minutes with my standard power settings. In fact, if I launch one of my applications that drive the 6 core CPU to full capacity and pull the power plug, the battery fails instantly and the computer shuts off. I had hoped to borrow Andra's energy sipping laptop for this weekend, but she was still assisting Bailey. I configured the power settings for maximum savings, but combined with my radio drawing many amps every time I transmit, I wasn't sure how many hours of operation I'd get after dark.

That rectangular antenna you saw modeled can be seen in the tree. The wood top and bottom spreader can be seen and the white PVC pipe that prevents the feed line from drawing the two sides together at the feed point are also visible. The white tube hanging down from the middle of the PVC pipe is a 1:1 current balun and the coax is attached to that. Above the top wood spreader is the feed point of the off center fed dipole.
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