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Is the battery indicator on the VX-8DR just there to taunt me?

J

JakiChan

Member
May 5, 2010
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It seems to serve no other function. I was trying to run the battery down, admittedly, and turned the radio on this morning. Full meter. It quickly dropped to 0 and then shut off.

I can monitor battery voltage of course - at what point should I start getting ready to swap batteries?
 

Yes. It's there to tease you. My VX8 works the same way, but this is fairly typical of HT's. The worst is when the radio just shuts off, mid TX.
 
If a phone can correctly monitor voltage then why not a radio? Is the voltage displayed meaningful? Or do you just run it 'til it dies and swap batteries?

(Good thing for field day my Golf has a lighter jack in trunk and you can run the cradle off of it. It seems the cradle charges fast enough that I shouldn't run low on power, in theory.
 
Simply reading the voltage across a battery is not an effective way to judge it's condition. Just like a service garage would not use just a volt meter to check your car battery. The battery should be placed under load while the voltage is checked. Fortunately all walkie talkies come equipped with a built in load tester. It's called the transmit button. Your cell phone seems to do a much better job at monitoring the battery because it places a fairly constant load on the battery while in use. It's a full duplex device that holds a low power transmitter on the entire time it's in use. The walkie talkie will average at least ten times more current drain in high power transmit then in receive. If you need to know the true condition of the battery, transmit in full power while you look at the battery monitor for a brief second. Once the monitor begins to move off full charge in high power transmit, you have a reasonable amount of receive time left but little full power transmit time.
 
The issue is the curve on the batteries and the amount of current drain when transmitting. The batteries have a pretty flat usage curve, and unlike cell phones that are using milliwatts you are using more power so the failure of the battery is more sudden. The voltage measurement is really the only way to monitor the battery with any sort of accuracy.
 
vx-8dr battery inicator

it works fine with the larger battery the stock not so much have had mine for 2 years now both batterys work fine still have all the add ons ran aprs for 16 hours on a boating trip with the larger battery (y)
 

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