Power at 3B7C

Isle du Sud is a desert island ! So 3B7C needs to provide all its own power (and water, and food etc etc).

We are taking 30 kW of generating power, sourced from six conservatively rated diesel generators. These units have been tested in the UK by team members, and we hope they will prove reliable. They are certainly very heavy (175 Kg each) !

We will take some 3,000 litres of diesel, which should be sufficient to provide power for the full duration of the DXpedition. We will be carrying out careful maintenance of the generators on a scheduled basis, which means that occasionally we may need to switch off one or two of our linears and run barefoot. But this will only be during the daytime, and will not impact our LF signals at all.

Each generator provides power to two stations:

One Yaesu FT2000 100 watt transceiver driving one Yaesu VL1000 linear amplifier

One Yaesu FT2000 200 watt transceiver running barefoot

Two computers

One fan

One 12v psu

This is well within the capability of each of the 5 Kw generators.

Our plan is to use the 6 linears most of the time, as follows

* The 10m station amplifier will be switched to 6m when the band is open

Depending on propagation and the progress we make in QSO numbers on each band, the above plan may change to allow use of the linears during the evening on the HF bands that otherwise would be barefoot.

                                                                              Our six generators