[amsat-bb] Re: FM satellites

[Gordon JC Pearce]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2011 17:04:29 -0400
Joseph Armbruster <josepharmbruster at gmail.com> wrote:

> Gordon,
> 
> That's interesting!  I live down in Florida and had no clue that some of
> those towers were powered by diesel!
> 
> Do you know how many gallons (or liters) it takes to run the tower for a
> week?
> 
> Joseph Armbruster
> KJ4JIO

The tank on site near the high site I was working on last week is about the same size as my 1300 litre heating oil tank.  It's a 10kVA genny, somewhere around 2 litres per hour, and it gets topped up every two weeks.

A rough back-of-an-envelope calculation gives about three and a half weeks running time to dry, not allowing for any load-shedding.  Presumably you could knock down the RAN output power, or drop off one of the microwave links if you needed to save a bit of fuel.

Gordon MM0YEQ