Review: Emergency Power for Radio Communications

I added Emergency Power for Radio Communications (2ed) to the library a little while ago and with the move to the new house soon, thought it would be good to give it another read.

The book covers a wide range of options for lighting when power goes out, generating and storing power for your shack, instrumentation for monitoring and safety.

Generating power is covered by chapters on solar, gas generators, wind turbines and even a short blurb on hydroelectric generators. Chapters covering load sizing and battery systems are very informative. The battery chapter talks about several different types of batteries, with the bulk of the chapter covering the venerable lead acid battery. There are several examples of large battery banks and how to install and maintain them.

An appendix (one of three) collects a bunch of useful articles from past issues of QST, including projects, reviews and informational articles.

Most of the content is geared towards supplying supplying emergency and backup power for fixed installations, but the many of the ideas and concepts in the book can also be scaled down for mobile and portable stations as well or applied to powering anything electrical.

Overall, the book is pretty easy to read and contains a lot of good information that will come in handy. I learned quite a bit reading this book.

This would be a good addition to the bookshelf if you’re

• looking for power ideas for portable/mobile ops
• thinking about adding emergency/backup power to your shack
• augmenting an existing emergency/backup power system
• wanting to learn more about power systems in general

I’ll give this 5 stars out of 5.