"Highland Ham" wrote in message
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A marine battery is fine ,simple and reliable . However if 'trickle
charger
' is really a trickle charger ,when operating on FM (with full carrier)
the
voltage when battery was fully charged might drop from say 13.8 to 12.8 V
,with battery still being 80 % charged. This means the power input and
hence
RF ouput will probably be less than the transceiver's rated power

You make a good point, Frank. A couple of years ago I bought a relatively
cheap battery charger (for the car, not for the radio), and was surprised at
what microprocessors have done to these things. Float charging, which is
basically what you want, is available from these things pretty commonly now,
as well as a myriad of other features. I guess the engineers put a $2 PIC
into one of these things and now they got to make excuses to use it. They
can't charge a lot less than the next guy so they need to out-feature them.
Anyway, the modern automotive battery charger has all nature of features.
It has become another of these devices with an impenetrable manual!

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