Solar energy seems to be booming, but is it really that easy to generate electricity with it?
When I started building the station in 2016/17, there was still no solar boom, and the ‘climate change’ that had been known since the 1980s was a long way off or had not yet reached the minds of some. There is now a word for the non-existent electricity yield of a solar installation in constant fog: the term ‘dark doldrums’.
If the fog no longer dissipates and the capacity of the storage cells has fallen to 50%, a lead-acid system switches off in a programmed manner.
If you then have no other operating option, it looks just as dark in terms of DX as the sky above. The phenomenon of the dark doldrums seems to manifest itself during the period of global warming, in the autumn and winter seasons when there is little sunshine anyway.
The first dark doldrums with persistent fog in 2018/19 lasted for almost 3 months.
No energy yield was possible during this time. But autumn and winter are also good DX times, and if there is no power yield, DXing won't work either. A very unsatisfactory situation that is hard to bear as a DXer.
In the beginning I was content to integrate a power bank from home into the station to be able to do at least some DX, e.g. to Asia in the afternoon. With a 20 Ah battery, at least 2 hours of operation was possible, even if nothing else worked. But I always had to be on site for this. Time-controlled recordings were possible to a limited extent, but not the yellow of the egg.
This season seems to be a repeat of the doldrums from back then. And my fear is that these conditions will become manifest. We keep heading into this situation in the autumn/winter months.
So what can we do? The remote station is in a location where there is no other power grid. It was built to avoid disruption and to be able to continue the hobby. The only solution is to use mobile lithium cells, which are charged at home and changed daily. 2x50 Ah are sufficient for the time being. A battery weighs approx. 5.5 kg, so is still easy to transport, and lasts as long as a 100 Ah lead-acid battery, which is many times heavier.
My station is now very easy to reach from a distance. There are hardly any circuits that I can't control from home. The sense and purpose of a remote-controlled station is no longer clear to me when I have to change the batteries almost every day. The operating effort is simply too great. The joy and time for DXing is gone. I've had no power for 3 weeks straight since the beginning of November. Then there were a few sparse sunny days. They were not enough to fully charge the cells. The consumption was higher than the yield. The current dark doldrums will certainly end at some point, and I hope that my patience will not be exhausted. Maximising profit is also my goal, but you can't beat the batteries with a stick to get even more out of them. This can only be achieved with people, and everyone has played their part in this situation, which is now called the dark doldrums.
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