 Well, my DEFCON ham radio village talk on my rover van My name is Pete Kovac and my call sign is kilo zero Bravo Alpha kilo. I want to say first that I'm Really happy to be here at DEFCON even virtually because I spent 17 years in web application security And although I attended quite a few security conferences in that time. I never did get to DEFCON So I'm glad I'm here now, and I'm glad you're here with me I first got licensed relatively recently after waiting 40 years when I first Had an interest in ham radio as a teenager But didn't have money and then didn't have time with a family and career and I had I had been fascinated by reading about the activity of roving either Activating counties and state USO parties or grids and VHF contests And my first effort was in 2014 in the Pennsylvania QSO party my home state And I won the category mostly because there wasn't much competition in the category but still I had a lot of fun doing it and it wasn't bad to win either so I Kind of a career was started there in In roving in contest When I first started I used the family minivan and on the left here you can see four low VHF bands on a Rotator in the back of the van and here is the HF antenna. I started with Which was an elevated ground plane I sent for place that with the screwdriver antenna because although this antenna works well It takes too long to set up although I had fun operating the family minivan It was a pain in the neck to have to tear it To tear it down each time after I've done and then build it out the next time also couldn't drill holes So I was thinking she it sure would be nice to have a dedicated vehicle The ultimate such vehicle would be electronic news gathering It would have a pneumatic mask power and racks and it would be a perfect base for a VHF Hamrover I looked I looked every so often not really very seriously. They always seem to be offered far away and I wasn't really looking in any kind of systematic way However in the summer of 2016 my buddy Rob found the TV van that it was only two hours away. So we went up there Since he's a gear head. He gave it a Mechanical thumbs up. We saw that the generated pneumatic mask worked and After going away for a couple weeks and thinking about it I actually I purchased it and paid for it in effect by delaying my retirement Here's a list of the features in the van. I won't go through these step-by-step, but a pneumatic mask power generators a Powerful engine because it's a it's a quite a heavy vehicle And a flat roof with a ladder that was meant for TV reporting that would make it easier to Climb up there and install antennas that I needed here's what the van looked like when it was on offer at the dealer You can see some Pretty heavy antennas on the roof of the van that would have to be removed for my own antennas to be installed And here's a look at the interior production area where you can see that they removed all their expensive equipment And left the cables behind Now I bought the van at the end of October of 2016 registered it replaced the batteries and Something I didn't even think about was Garaging it so I didn't have a garage tall enough for it so I threw a top a tarp over it which didn't work all that well then certainly didn't look very good and Didn't have any build progress that winter in the spring I took down the antennas I could by by disassembly it and walking the antennas down the the ladder, but the front antenna for satellite was too heavy and Another buddy of mine from a VHF club Phil K3 TOF Helped me by taking it off with a pulley at a at his pole as a pole barn Ironically the first radio that I had installed in the van was not a ham radio, but was a was a combination radio backup camera and Navigation device also had a Bluetooth player for a long drive, which is not a small thing when you're doing a long drive by yourself One of my first bad surprises was in the spring after I bought it I found that the the generator the motor parts started right up, which is good, but there was no voltage. I could find I Was surprised by this because we saw the meters on at the dealer and it ran the pneumatic mass At least I thought so I finally discovered that the AC we saw at the dealer had come from the van engine and I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I don't even know It had that feature. I guess it's good to have the feature, but bad that I didn't know about it so The generator part of that gasoline genset had to be rebuilt expensively and it took quite a while at the same time of 2017 is my first year of retirement and I did a lot of operating because I had the freedom to do so and Because I was operating I didn't make much progress on the on the van finally at near the end of the year I deconstructed the minivan rover in the hopes that I would have more time or force myself at least to have more time to Outfit the outfit the TV van the next winter I found a garage for it that was relatively new and The problem was it was one hour drive each way But at least I had a place to keep it over the winter and could do some work inside during the winter months the first big project in the winter was to remove the The cables that were left behind I did so by not cutting them But removing them and putting them aside or or wrapping them up here on the side and cleaning the whole van Which had not seen much cleaning since it was built in 2001 First thing I ever built for the van was a shore power connection Here's a little a little cable with a Adapter that was kind of unusual you would have thought it would be standard in the RV world It was not so it was hard to find and surprisingly expensive, but at least my first build was successful First of many things I've built for the van down the down the years Now in 2018 unfortunately most progress halted because of a major series of basement floods We had at home took out my home station and spent Forced me to spend a lot of time Fixing it up or preparing it to be fixed up and and renewed again So very little progress was made on the TV van because of that 2019 though I had quite a bit of progress in the van I won't go through this entire list, but One of the big features of that year was operating in the Canadian National Parks on the air program installing radios the power systems I used during that operation and a Microwave power shelf. So in contrast to the previous year. I didn't make a lot of progress two years ago In this calendar year though it The major theme including the end of the very end of last year was mechanical problems with the with the engine in particular the Serpentine belt in the engine. So the van was out of commission for many weeks in two different events Not allowing me to make progress in building or operating in the van in between the events I did go on what I called Corona roves to local parks and operated from parks since I could still be isolated from other people while operating inside the van And right at the moment the station is down for upgrades, but that's a good thing and it'll be back on the year shortly now I'd like to talk about power which was most of my effort of building the interior of the van so far so I So I started with surveying the Capabilities of the van as is the van has three five kilowatt AC sources a generator set that I talked about an origin that was power from the Vehicle and the plug insure powers. So the problem with the generator set was that It was very loud inside of him in audio wise It was it was really loud and shaky and not only was allowed inside the van if I was everywhere Where the public would be like a park? It would be really distracting and not a nice thing to to subject other people to The origin is relatively quiet because just the van engine is running, but it RF wise It was horribly horribly noisy. So that was out lastly There's RF noise just from the van engine even when the origin system wasn't on So my overall conclusion was that I needed batteries for doing weak signal of radio I couldn't rely on any of the internal generating sources the DC power system included two Two batteries wired in parallel permanently Which was which was a shame because it would have been nice if the auxiliary battery was was switched in I notice There was no protection for high current circuits, which made some odd some additions to the DC power system dangerous. I Did have available 320 amp radio DC circuits But that's really not enough power to to even have a barefoot power no less amplifiers The battery charger that they left behind that I started trying to use was actually burned out Which is probably why they left behind and So my overall conclusion was that I also needed a separate radio station DC power system I couldn't take much advantage of anything that was existing in the van for DC power So what were my power assumptions when I started? I was going to use my my home station flex 5000 SDR so The thing about the that series of flex radios was that the radio processing was processing was done on a PC via fire wire The laptop was out of the question because of the using less reliable connections So I needed to use a rock-mounted desktop class PC and that meant I needed AC power for that PC So going through this this line of assumptions led me to the conclusion that the station would be based on AC power And DC would come from conventional power supplies just like you'd use at home And I'd use a use batteries and inverter for AC power because as I said before I couldn't rely on the internal generators I decided on that the AC power would be up to three kilowatts So I could eventually accommodate legal limit amplifiers and I want to make that decision Once because it was heavy and hard to wire So I wanted to make sure I was future proof even if I wasn't going out with the limit amplifiers at first I would use direct battery power for the station DC and I would use dual batteries for flexibility either she I could use the AC inverter For once from one battery with the DC supply from another or maybe I could use one while charging the other I knew I would I would get good flexibility by having two batteries and Lastly I would need a charger maintainer for the van batteries Because it would be the van would be in storage a lot of the time and like any vehicle you need to maintain those lead acid batteries Hey, here's a Here's a diagram of the overall power design context. Now. I first have to apologize Because my writing is so terrible Seems like I learned to print and to draw and didn't make and and then just stop learning when I was at the age of 7 So my drawings are awful and I don't have the time or patience to draw them in a in a you know a drawing program, so I Hope you'll forgive me for these for these awful looking diagrams, but anyway The overall context diagram includes the old systems and the new systems includes both AC and DC and We're going to be going over many of these systems one at a time well, we went over the requirements the context diagram and Now we'll spend some time on the implementation of those power systems Here's a picture of the the key power components Here's that three kilowatt inverter charger switch that I mentioned and here are two 200 amp hour each nominally 12 volt batteries these are 115 pounds each, so They are quite beefy Batteries that can deliver an enormous amount of current Even just mounting the batteries required skills I didn't have before and that's one theme I wanted to to bring out that this entire project Taught me quite a few really basic Mechanical real-world skills that I didn't have before many people learn how to do things like a cut with a table saw when they're with her in the teenage years. I didn't know any of that. I had like a Virtual life on computers my almost my entire career So this was new to me and it was scary of making my first cut on my first table on my first table saw So This is just one especially dangerous example of things that I learned to do just for the sake of the van So using that table saw and my new found skills I cut boards to constrain the those 115 pound batteries Horizontally use straps that you can just barely see here and here to constrain the batteries vertically and Here is a binding post to tie together all the negative side of the system. So let me describe the AC part of the system build Over here. Here's the the native AC system that was already in the in the van and here is my new AC system the the inverter charger Switch can supply current to the AC system in a in a back-feed arrangement and the power is supplied from the shore power into the New AC system into that big blue box. I showed I Would have 15 amp outlets That that are existing in the racks and I would also build 25 amp outlets that were brand new and To run off of battery power there would also be a very large 200 amp capacity connection to the battery system So here's a diagram of the AC power circuit what I did was to Connect into rather than replace I connected into existing AC circuits in the van. So here is a supply that I pulled off of the I pulled off of these original circuits that are no longer used in the van To supply AC power Into the inverter say from shore power what I'm what I'm for instance charging the batteries and then the output of the inverter would go through a a new 30 amp circuit breaker and then branch off into two of the racks for a 15 existing 15 amp circuit and another existing 15 amp circuit for the other two racks and Lastly I installed two new Sockets for higher current AC supply and here's what the here's what the new AC power panel look like this is the main circuit breaker here are the 215 amp circuit breakers in a double arrangement and They're here to higher current sockets for some day for legal limit amplifiers that require this amount of AC current Here are the Two multi-wired cables going back to the electrical panel. We'll take a look at the electrical panel shortly And here's that same system Mounted on to the back of rack number one Now these two these two multi-wire cables go to the AC distribution in the back driver side of the van Which looks like this? This is a before picture and this is an after picture and you can see those same two Multi-wire cables coming up into the panel on this side and being wired into existing circuits And you can see that I was lucky that this terminal block had a lot of unused circuits So that made it a lot easier than it would otherwise have been to wire in my own my own connections into the AC panel now I added some labels to the Native power panel to tell me How the switches should be laid out at least in ordinary operating conditions. So this is the This would be the input power into the Into that big blue box the inverter charger switch and these even though they're off in this picture These should would normally always be on and in contrast. I am Connecting the output of the of that inverter to these two circuits or normally these would be off Because I already have current on them But this does allow me to do a back feed into the rest of the AC system If I had some emergency that would require me to supply AC to other parts of the van besides the rack circuits that were intended And here's both DC power panels and we'll be going into this in detail This is a picture at the bottom of rack number two in other words the middle of the three racks So I'm first going to be talking about the the battery system That's really at the core of the entire system that supplies power to both the AC system that we just talked about and to the station power The battery circuit is relatively simple electrically But it was hard to build because of the the size of the cables that I had to deal with So you can see that here there are two the two batteries. I showed in the picture earlier each battery has Two fuses mounted right on the terminal, which I'd even know existed before I started this project So that's a that's a nice safety feature to have a fuse rate on the terminal of the battery 200 amp coming off of each battery for the Inverter charger to give it enough power to supply three kilowatts of AC power and then the 80 amp circuit coming off of each Battery goes to this switch and then to the station power system here Here's more of a close-up of the Battery switch panel So here are the two switches that I showed in the in that circuit diagram They can select either battery or both together or of course both on or I'm sorry for both off these two green Panel meters Alternately show voltage and current but only when their respective switches on and this is this is always shows voltage to the batteries No matter the switch position All these meters are only on when the meter switch is on that allows me to not drain the battery unnecessarily when say the the van is in storage Here's the back of that same panel. You can see how large some of these cables are This is a quad zero gauge wire It's very big and very expensive and really hard to work with as you might imagine. These are two double zero Cables that go to each battery and this is the 200 amp side of the circuit And of course, this is the 80 amp side of the circuit with four gauge wire being used for that wiring Here's a top view of the installed batteries with the With the two fuses that I mentioned earlier here Connecting to the panel and you can just barely see down here the common Connection point for all the negative leads in between the two batteries is a Which I'll be talking about shortly an 80 amp boost regulator It just happened to fit very well between the batteries just by chance So it's a nice spot for as nice and cozy in there without having to take up and say a Rack space so that was a that was a lucky thing Now let's talk about the two-way charging system and here are the controls for the for that two-way charging system on the right is a another Another instance of that volt and meter in this case. This is showing the voltage and current from the From or to the van battery system This is a meter switch like I talked before so I could turn this meter off when the van is in storage and Here's a double-throw switch that allows me to put current in either direction into the batteries from or to the Native vehicle battery so on the in the up position. I can charge the Station from the van alternator while the van is in operation in the down position. I can charge the the van batteries when the of course when the van is stationary I can charge the van batteries while While AC power supplied Here's a circuit of that two-way charging system So the so the key part of the system is these two 65 amp solenoids that Connect the station battery to the vehicle battery When necessary these are in turn energized by a By this smaller capacity relay that fire six seconds after the ignition signal is set I have this six second delay in order to allow the the van engine to stabilize before I connect the the large station batteries to the van batteries and down here is a Something called a battery tender in other words a battery maintainer charger and This can be switched in or not are or out by that double throw toggle switch that I showed in the panel before and this supplies current into the van DC system with the solenoids off in that position so I can charge into the van DC system Next I'm going to talk about the station power system and that is fed from the battery system with Up to 80 amps and Then moves as a regulated 80 amps into station equipment or into the computer And here's the station power control Panel on the left hand side of that of the same rack panel. I showed before one controls the input into the Into the 80 amp booster and the other controls whether I am supplying power to HF components VHF components or both the station battery Switch output that 80 amp switch I showed on the lower panel first goes to a MIDI fuse block To supply current to the unregulated battery output binding post Supplies current in from the two-way charging system I showed earlier and the main circuit is 80 amp fuse that protects the rest of the system for all the other station components There's a panel switch that I showed in the previous picture that That can turn this circuit on or off and also can have a supply instead of from the station batteries from some Power supply if I ever wanted to run the station on AC instead of DC That goes into that 80 amp boost regulator that was between the two batteries that I showed earlier I have a shunt resistor and an analog meter to measure the instantaneous Current being used by the entire system and the output of the boost regulator goes to Binding posts for further distribution and here is that for the distribution This is the connection point from the left hand side of the previous diagram One side goes to an unswitched Power pole distribution for things like radios. I'm going to use for both HF and VHF The rest of the the rest of the distribution goes through the panel switch to select either the HF or VHF equipment and the HF Cable goes into a MIDI fuse box on another rack shelf Into the amplifier and a power pole distribution for HF only components like the screwdriver antenna and the remote SWR meter in The VHF position we have a high current and a low current connection The high current goes through a MIDI fuse box that I used in my old minivan rover to go to for medium power amplifiers for the low VHF bands and Another branch goes to a power pole distribution system for low current components like a small flex radio amplifier fans transverters and an SWR power meter power system one little branch circuit from the previous diagram goes through a fuse box that can distribute unregulated Battery power and the only component using that so far is the computer and we'll talk about that a little bit later Here's a picture of the Station power distribution shelf So this is the connector I showed before that was scary to put on because it was a live hot the DC That would have that would have welded my tools if I wasn't careful The two fuses for the input DC from the van Here's the solenoid relays and the relay timer for for the delay of Connecting the station batteries to the van alternator Here's the first Fuse box for the distribution of battery power to three different destinations the most important of which is the Booster and that Cable goes here to the front panel switch that selects either the booster I'm sorry selects either the battery or a power supply for the input to the booster the boosters underneath this panel and comes out here on The hot side and on the ground side. So this is where the regulated voltage comes out from the booster That can be connected to directly or Another circuit goes to another panel switch that allows me to switch to either VHF distribution over here or to HF distribution over here above that station distribution shelf is an accessories rack shelf that includes a System to power laptops that I normally that I no longer use in the in the van But that this was a big help when I was transitioning off of laptops unto the Into a permanently install computer On this side are the three connection blocks that I talked about in the previous circuit diagram This is this the direct station battery unregulated 12 volts from the station batteries that go to the to the PC This power pole distribution block is the unswitched Power that goes to things like radios that I need for both HF and VHF and here as you can see on the label is the power pole distribution for VHF only components like transverters Now I'd like to talk about the build out of the HF and six meter amplifiers And there's a series of photographs that show the build process just as an example of how I Built these things out for better or worse The HF amplifier is an Ameritron 500m amplifier, which produces about 400 RF watts This this is the side of the distribution That supply HF only power poles for other lower current devices and We're going to see a series of construction pictures next Here's the amplifier mounted using a a piece of angled aluminum where I screwed in the screwed in the aluminum into existing Screw holes for the cover of the amplifier and then the vertical bolts bolt down into the Into the rack shelf After the amplifier put in wood in the other spaces in order to mount the rest of the system here and They use for future items here, which turned out to be the six meter amplifier that I'll talk about Here's just mounting the main components in the back and here we are wired Here's the high current connections to the amplifier through these MIDI fuses and one more branch goes to this small Power pole distribution and you can see this unusual connection of just the positive side This is the bias voltage, which is a separate wire That goes into the Ameritron amplifier and finally This is the system actually mounted in the van with all the connections here is a remote probe for SWR and RF power that I connected to the output of the of the amplifier Here's several of the HF only components and cooling this screwdriver and the and that probe Here is a PT T line from the amplifier to To hit the relay during transmission for the for the amplifier and finally here the here's the power input into this shelf from the Station booster shelf the picture of which I showed earlier With two four gauge cables that go down to that other shelf Now just this week I installed a six meter amplifier that I had for a long time and a 50 volt power system So the amplifier needed 50 volts and I decided to supply that with my first big lithium battery and Also built a switching monitoring and inrush board that I'll show later Here's the mount board for the six meter amplifier that I used to help to help tie down that amplifier The legs go into these glued down PVC caps. I have four eyelets for small bungee cords to Constrain the amplifier vertically and these are four countersunk holes So I can put wood screws into the piece of wood that's below this mounting board And here's the amplifier mounted next to the HF amplifier now there's two years between these two things I built this shelf with the amp with the HF amplifier two years ago And this was just this week that I put the six meter amplifier in Here's a picture of that large 50 volt 50 amp battery with some of the tools I use for the for the connections And here's what the battery look like Before I put the Restraining boards in I put the battery in with the connector to make sure everything fit as I expected before starting to make cuts And as you can see this is the that AC distribution I talked about early in my presentation and here is the box for the generator So this this little kind of cubby hole is otherwise wasted space So although I had to turn the battery on the side It was a nice fit and nice use for otherwise wasted space that cable from the battery is Mounted on a board and the board is mounted on the side of the van and this represent the connection point for the battery This allows me to connect or disconnect the battery as necessary for my different operations Here's the 50 volt power shelf That I that I built recently This is a this is a box that contains a a shunt resistor for the metering system and a bolted down MIDI battery and this is the cable for the For supplying the the voltages to the to the battery monitor here in the front This is all in a like a treasure box a wooden treasure box from a hobby store kind of hillbilly engineering I call it but I can close this lid to protect all these different connection points I'm kind of paranoid now that I'm fit 50 volts versus 14 volts that can supply quite a shock Over here, maybe the most unusual looking part of this system is These resistors connected in parallel also mounted in a in a hobby box This is for an inrush current protection What I saw was when I use this amplifier several years ago was that there was a quite a spark of very high current as the capacitors got charged up from The capacitors the amplifiers got charged up from the battery and that kind of big inrush of current is not good For the battery and it's not good for the connectors so a feature that I included was an inrush current protection by forcing the initial current to go through a Total of 16 ohms that limits the current to less than four amps and then that rapidly degrades to To allow me to give it allow me to give it full power two switches on the front one to Charge the battery through this Conventional power pole connection so the the charger gets connected here And I have one position for the charge the other position goes to this other switch One position of which forces the current through the 16 ohm resistors for For inrush current limitation and the other position number two position is a straight connection into the amplifier without the resistors for normal operation and here this is a this is a meter that I had removed to make room for this shelf and This was this was just simply a convenient place to put this Meter that monitors the voltage for my booster and my my batteries for the 14 volt system So this has nothing to do with the 50 volt system It was just a convenient place because I have a limited amount of rack space and lastly here's the whole system I Configured for a test you can barely see maybe the the numbers on the on the meter that shows that shows instantaneous voltage amperage and Shows overall amp hours and watt hours. So that's this meter glowing here You can see the lights on over here at the at the amplifier. This is an actually an HF Dummy load that's supposed to go up to as you can see goes up to 30 megahertz But I I used it because I didn't have any other dummy load that could take that much power It was a 1.6 to 1 SWR at low power So so I didn't want to fire this 6 meter amplifier up all the way, but I did verify that it it puts out 20 times the power that's put into it I tested up to 600 watts with a FM carrier. So I'm satisfied. It basically works and nothing smoked So it was it was nice to have that first test go well I have not yet installed VHF Equipment although my VHF equipment is is battle tested. I have it installed the shelves But when I do each band will be on one shelf each one will include a medium power amplifier Which I kind of referred to earlier in a the power distribution Power distribution schematic I'll have a digital SWR meter for probes for each band so I can see the power going going out of each amplifier and As I mentioned all the VHF equipment is already contest proven So I have confidence that the equipment I have will work. It's just a matter of of mounting it the 10 meter or 28 megahertz IF that goes into the transverter port will will come from the milliwatt output of the of the flex radio 6500 and I'll probably have a manual switch for selecting which band gets that IF Initially, but I do want to do want to install an automatic switch so I can select the band From the radio and they have the IF switch through a relay and I have that I have those components But I want to do one step at a time It was good to talk about the power first But next I want to talk about the radio and computers in the van when I first started and I made major Major assumptions about power systems. I originally aimed to use the flex 5000 Which is my first hundred watt radio that I use at home It it's it's well-suited because as transverter outputs and multiple multiple RF and PTT outputs that you'd expect from a flagship radio and the need for the need for a Good powerful PC for this SVR drove the decision originally to use AC power for the van Now what happened that after I installed the entire AC system? One of my VHF club members offered a new generation flex 6500 for a surprisingly low price That series that latest series from flex radio includes self-contained computing power So you don't need a big PC that fantastic programmable interface for driving relays that makes Some downstream work a lot easier than it would be with with any other radio that I know of It also has the same transverter and multiple programmable PTT outputs as my 5,000 and Lastly not a big thing, but it's nice that it directly supports rack mounting So I did buy that even though I made a lot of expensive decisions to That that were The foundation of which were the assumption I was going to use the flex 5000 So I now have a flex 6500 in the van and here it is mounted Here's the front of the radio, which currently most of that's obscured by my monitor But I do have a look I do have access to the power button. That's the most important thing and here's the connections to the Headphones and the and the foot switch and here's a view of the rear of the radio It's not it's it's not the flagship of the of the line But it has enough connections to to make things worthwhile and you'll see the most Unusual connection for most radios is this ethernet connection and that connects to my PC In order to to have a GUI for this radio because you can see on the front panel There is there are no conventional controls like a VFO knob Another radio I installed was the Icom IC 7100. That was my first mobile radio for both HF and VHF rover Contesting so it has HF it has to VHF Well, I guess three if you count six meters three VHF or UHF Band so it's a it's a really nice tremendous value radio and I use as a backup radio maybe an IF for my for the microwaves maybe as a FM radio for for just Making contacts to the local repeater. Anyway, it's a jack-of-all-trades radio that was Turned out to be vital because an older radio Broke when I was on a major roof in Canada and I was able to Use that I that IC 7100 in the in the roof Preventing a major disaster for that long trip And this just shows the that IC 7100 under test and various components of the of that rack shelf Where the main unit of the IC 7100 is tied down here? This is a PTT connections because it's a small radio So everything comes out of this multi-pin connection that allows me access to this and this is a Automatic screwdriver antenna tuner, which I really don't use that much, but I had it So I mounted it with the radio that it operates with Now again another decision that was based on originally wanting to use the flex 5000 that needs a big PC was to get a Desktop class rack-mounted PC. I had this built by a specialist vendor who Built PCs especially for that that series of flex radios now with the new generation the flex 6500 It's overkill. I don't need anywhere near that amount of CPU power, but I already have it. So that's what I'm using Later on I replaced the original EC power supply from the vendor with a DC supply In other words, what I mean by DC supply is that it's a computer power supply, but instead of the input being AC It's DC that thing was expensive But it eliminated the original need for the AC base station and again Boy, I wish I made that decision a year before because I spent a lot of time and money getting an AC base station built the that that power supply accepts a wide voltage input and That voltage accepted it was within the range of the raw battery. So I don't have to I don't have to regulate that voltage I can just connect it to my Batteries as is through of course through of course a distribution system that I showed you earlier so This PC works great with the new flex 6500 and also works with the older 3000 or 5000 lines because it has a good firewire connection Now what I did was brought out the 5 volts and 12 volts from inside the PC to a connector outside for the for use of low current logic like Arduino boards or relay boards rather than having a separate DC power supply for those components So I haven't actually used that yet but that's gonna save some rack space and possibly save some additional source of RF noise and Lastly at least I have a video adapter in there that supports a UHD 4k monitor not all built-in video systems of a of a PC without a separate adapter would would support a High-def monitor and that is a big deal to make that's a big help So here's the rack mount PC the back of the PC anyway Nothing very remarkable except it does take a lot of room in the in the rack And it's kind of heavy and actually one of my projects that I'm going to do shortly is to reinforce this because I really should have some some weight support in the back of this this PC rather than just laying and hanging from the front and Just to emphasize again. This is the power input to the to the To the PC and the that DC input power supply is supplied through these input terminals where normally the Modular AC connector would be My computer monitor is a 4k monitor It's kind of mounted kind of floppy, but I'm working on an improved mount There's enough room for a SDR interface and many windows and man screen real estate is really vital in today's hand contest that you have chat pages you have monitoring systems you have that your logger you have a Rotator control so all these controls are Our soft controls so it takes a lot of real of a Monitor real estate space Now I use Samsung monitors. I use a smaller one before and what? At least they used to I don't know what the what the situation is today But many of the the mid-range and above Samsung monitors use a separate AC to 14 volt adapter I don't know of any other manufacturer that has a 14 volt input So what's nice there is I can replace the the power brick that takes AC with a power pole connector So I can directly supply DC voltage from my station supply as the input into the into the monitor so I had just a recommendation if you want to if you want to run your monitor from station power look into the Samsung monitors and And and you'll have a little bit of a little bit of simplicity in one less brick one less source of RF interference And here's a picture of the of the operating position showing that monitor and the and the nice amount of Screen real estate this is a old radio. They used to use they used to use a flex 3000 that's been replaced and here's one of the most important things I ever bought which was a Battery operated fan and this is blowing right at my face And it is a difference between operating in 90 degree weather or not operating 90 degree weather Remember the van is off. There's no There's no air conditioning in the van when I'm operating So having that fan be able to blow on me is is a huge help on hot summer days Next I'm going to go quickly through microwaves that I've Progress I've made on microwaves so far in the van Now I was just starting to buy use microwave Equipment even for even in my mini van days. That's kind of like my Normal pattern where I if I know I'm going to go someplace down the road if I see an inexpensive piece of equipment being offered I'll just buy it up knowing that I would use it for the future now then a Then a successful path grass my VHF clubs name a Rover retired from roving and he sold me his complete set of working microwave bands from from 33 centimeters or 903 MHz all the way up to 24 gig They were put aside so that I could still I could work on I Concentrated first on the lower five microwave bands because they were interior mounted The physically the 33 and 23 centimeter bands were separate on two on a two-tier wood mounts and the Next three bands were on one long plywood board So I had a project to separate all the equipment and mount them each on a rack shelf Now here's those three bands on one big plywood board I talked about what I did was I believe it or not and I can't believe it myself sometimes I put that big board on the I did do a little bit of separation first, but Here because they're so close together, but I actually Ran the table saw I showed you earlier. I ran that table saw to physically disconnect Each of these bands and then mount each band on a separate rack shelf It's hard to see but you just barely see the outline of each shelf in this bottom row of pictures And here are those the first five microwave bands mounted in the in the fourth rack This is the rack that you can see Directly in when you first enter the side door of the van. So it goes 903 up the 5 gate down the bottom here are two 12 volt batteries about the size of a normal car battery although their deep cycle AGM batteries and their charger So this is the basic supply for the for the power for the microwaves And here's a picture of the rear Not terribly interesting and a lot of the mess of wires those green wires and blue wires are actually left over from the old Band so I'll probably be taking those out before making the connections on the back power requirements of the micros included high current twenty six point five volts high current twelve point six volts for for the four low bands And of course all the bands require nominal 12 volts for transversors, etc Like most radio equipment does and I had a requirement for five volts for for TTL logic and USB My peak power estimate was 250 watts total now one unusual problem was that these are Most of them anyway our class a amplifier So there's a large current draw whether or not there's RF applied so one of my requirements that I would supply power only when the particular band was selected and the relays on my distribution board should energize with grounding of the 24 volt system because that's the same Procedure that's used for the IF relay as I had the control pot the control power supplies would be Separate and I wanted to monitor the current and voltages in the system So here's the board I built to meet all those requirements Central to it of course are these two power supplies that have that have the two voltage outputs I need twelve point six and twenty six point five and they are powered from nominally 24 volts From the two batteries are on a bottom the two twelve volt batteries are are in series and the the only reason I made that decision versus a 12 volt supply at higher current was that I couldn't find power supplies with these outputs at these currents At anything less than a 24 volt supply here are my meters in the front. I'll have a better view of that later yet another Another shunt resistor to measure instantaneous current and the distribution of distribution of voltage to the Various components and the power supplies here are two relays that I used to switch in from the front panel and here's my much smaller five volt 5 volt power supply here is a Self-contained I bought this as one unit self-contained relay board with four relays this meets my requirements of only supplying power to the high current amplifiers when their particular band is selected so You can see that the there's two connections for 26 and two connections for 12 volts that are controlled by the relays and then the The triggers here that are 24 volts the triggers are brought out in this smaller terminal strip and over here this is meeting my requirement for the distribution of plain old 12 volts to the various components like Like transverters and these are all powered from of course the 12 volt power supply side so quite a lot going on in this board and This took me quite a long time to lay out all the components. No less build it all out Here's the front power panel the analog Ammeter is here. This is the battery monitor Volt of the battery voltage monitor that has a little graphic that shows how much power is left Which is possible because they're a GM batteries rather than lithium batteries here are three switches for turning on the power supplies individually and these are Meters digital meters that monitor to volt the the three different available voltages The reason I went to all the trouble of having separate switches for the power supplies was to limit inrush current So I could switch each power supply on in turn. So that was I mean I could have done it I guess more more in a more sophisticated way, but this was a simple solution to just flip flip flip and And limit the inrush total inrush current to the system And that's it if you're Watching this video live at DEF CON though I think we're going to have a live Q&A after this If not, if you're watching this video offline, you are welcome to write me at my QRZ email address