Paul Remde wrote:
Hi David,

You crack me up.

I highly recommend 12V systems in gliders. You can save yourself a lot of
money and hassle by using 12V batteries.

You want me to be like Mike/Strike and put in multiple 12 volt batteries
in hopes of getting enough juice to run a panel? After a while, he'll
figure out that switching batteries glitches his FR, computer, and radio,
so he starts throwing in the monster capacitors, the power Shottkies,
the microprocessor-controlled reed relays, and all the other garbage people
use to try to get around the problems. Seems like when people try to be
cheap and lazy, it ends up costing them time and money in the long run.
It's one of those false economies type of things.

My little 14 volt tail battery (singular) powers the panel just fine even
after being cold-soaked at 18 grand for 5 hours. In fact, at the end of
the flight, it delivers more juice to the panel than people flying around
with 20 A-H of batteries have at take off. Been running a FR for about
six years, and haven't had a single glitch in the data in all that time.
If you have some actual information about why running undervoltage batteries
is such a great idea, I'd like to hear it, but you really haven't offered
anything but personal opinion with no facts to back it up.


The design of radios has changed a lot in recent years. Good radios don't
require 14V batteries. Low cost and old radios do prefer 14V power.


Really? You need to immediately contact the German manufacturers and share
your revelations with them. Since you know more about the radios than they
do, they'll be happy to correct all the wrong information in their manuals.
If you should happen to actually read the manuals, you'll see they all
have nominal input voltages of 13.8 volts, just like always, but since
you're so much smarter than they are, you can rewrite the manuals for them.
Obviously, they all have no idea what they're talking about, since they're
only the ones who designed the radios.

Dave