wrote:
The weight of my luggage from the States is usually
> made up by half of disposable alkalines. Unfortunately these don't exist for
> the Tascam. The Tascam dies about a week or two into my stay (though I have 3
> Ecocharge batteries) if I am active. Therefore a workhorse Sony TCM 5000
> backup is standard equipment and often what I end up getting my best
> recordings with.
>
> I have a friend who operates under similar conditions in Amazonian Brazil who
> has solved some of these problems by carrying a flexible solar panel to
> charge a 12 v. motorcycle battery, which in turn powers (through an inverter)
> the various stock chargers of the equipment he uses. This works, but is quite
> bulky and weighty, a critical problem in these air travel days.
The same solar cell could charge a Li-ion battery of some capacity and
that could be used for charging other batteries. You will get far more
energy density for the weight going to Li-ion from lead acid. Even a
NIMH pac would be better. By careful thought in choice of equipment you
can keep the number of types of batteries down to a minimum and also
avoid using a inverter, inverters waste electricity. It would not be
that hard to design custom chargers to directly charge those from the
solar panels if need be. When I went to Australia for a long jaunt in
the outback I built a charger just for that trip that would charge a
very wide range of things as it had dial up settings and meters. I was
working off cars, but it would have run off a solar panel as well if
there had of been suitable panels available back then, it was wide
ranging in the DC voltage it would accept. In fact I also built in a
universal power supply and it could run off plug in power if available,
and of the worldwide standards. My entire sound recording kit and my
lighting currently will charge off car power as well as AC. I do use a
inverter to charge the main battery type used by my digital camera.
Mostly because the charger that will do it off 12 volts is very
expensive. And I charge 9volt rechargables to use in recharging the
Telinga off the inverter, too lazy to build the direct charger. Even my
laptop runs off straight 12volt car batteries via a appropriate power supply.
Now I have a couple of the light flexible solar panels and they do put
out a reasonable current. The Uni-solar marine ones I have can be
rolled, though not that tightly, the cells are plated onto a stainless
steel sheet backing, then it's all encased in flexible plastic. There
are quite a few varieties of panels for the sort of thing you need from
a number of companies. A link to Uni-solar:
http://www.uni-solar.com/cons_products.html
For your uses you might want to look at their Uni-pac panels instead of
the marine ones. They fold up instead of roll. And are designed for
military use.
Working with the 11W panel I have, I could directly feed my current car
based chargers and fast charge 4 AA's at a time. It would take less than
three hours to have 4 1800 mAh NIMH AA's charged. And that's not
efficient use of the panel, a charger more closely matched to it could
probably do twice that number.
I use a 5W panel as a battery maintainer on my boat. It's been out all
the time for a year now, looks and runs like new.
Going to a more modern recorder will cut your battery usage if you are
careful in your choice. The walkman style minidisc recorders get
considerable time out of AA batteries. They also are somewhat more
immune to the humidity than cassette. In addition they would cut the
volume and weight of your recording gear. The disks occupy less volume
than cassettes, and the recorders definitely do. You could get
160minutes stereo or 320 minutes mono in about 3/4 the space of one
cassette for the media. And there are MD recorders of about that size.
The media is a optical disk, which is archival. So there is no problem
carting them around for months before transferring. And, I'm sure you
have noted our comments on the improved sound quality you would
experience. You would want to use a little more care protecting them
from dust and dirt, but that's not that hard a problem. Walkman are
designed for sweaty folks to cart around and are pretty tough. And cases
are available for even more dire conditions. I went to minidisc to cut
down the problems from heat and humidity I was having with cassettes.
Note that using half your weight allowance for alkalines gives you
considerable weight to play with if you replaced them. Combine minidisc
recorders with solar charging and you can probably lighten your load a lot.
I do the practical side as you call it as well, though not to the extent
you do. For instance last year I went from August through to November
without ever plugging into wall power, and traveled over 8000 road
miles. And I was running a laptop, a high resolution digital camera with
flash, my recording gear including the portadisc, a GPS, and a bunch of
lighting. I did this all using rechargable batteries that were kept
charged via the vehicle I was traveling in. I routinely use this system
on shorter trips. Were I to be isolated from even that power source, my
first choice would be to design around solar and newer, lighter battery
technology. And I would also switch some of the gear I use if necessary.
I can do without a laptop in the field, and would go back to mechanical
film cameras. That would leave my biggest electric user the headlamps
for night work (I record frogcalls). Unless I brought the Portadisc and
recorded a whole lot in which case that would be close to the headlamps.
But those could be handled using solar panels and rechargeable batteries.
For serious operation away for power mains the technology is available.
But to make best use requires some planning. Everything you use has to
be looked at in terms of the power it needs and how you will supply it.
You will be paying a premium for your power.
Walt
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