Repeater Visit November 17, 2012

Tim (KE7TAC) and Dale (K7FW) made a quick trip to the repeater site in order to add water to the batteries and download data from the new sloar charge controller. It was a wet morning and as we got high on the mountain the temperature dropped and every now and then we could see that there was a flake of snow mixed in with the rain. The flat portion of the road up high was running water and the culverts beside the road were carrying a pretty good flow.

The battery voltage was 12.49 and specific gravity was 1.275. The batteries consumed quite a bit of water. Probably down about half way to the plates. We need to bring another gallon of distilled water on the next trip up. I read the documentation (help file) for the msview software before this trip so Tim and I were able to download the charge controller data to Tim's laptop.

See this link for information about charge controller data.

Here is a "birds eye" view of the battery filling.


And here is a plot of daily minimum battery voltage and watt hours of charge given the batteries since controller installation.



This plot was generated on a Linux system using gnuplot using the following procedure:
The data file was stripped of double quotes using:   tr -d '\"' < infile > outfile
The date format was altered such that no time information appeared.
Any commas in the second column were removed.
Gnuplot was run with the following intput file:
set multiplot layout 2,1 title "Battery min voltage and charge watt hours"
set bmargin 0
set format x ""
set ylabel "Watt Hours Charge"
set ytics nomirror
set title ""
set datafile separator ","
set xlabel ""
set xdata time
set timefmt "%Y-%m-%d"
unset key
set yrange [0.0:1000.0]
plot "data_2012_11_17.csv" using 1:7 title 'Wh' with line
set bmargin
set tmargin 0
set format x
set xlabel "Date"
set ylabel "Voltage"
set yrange [12.2:12.7]
unset key
plot "data_2012_11_17.csv" using 1:4 title 'MinV' with line
unset multiplot



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