On cloudy, rainy, or just dull days, the PV array will not provide enough juice to charge the battery that I ran down during the prior evening's QSOs. No sun, no charge. Somehow I should have expected that. To overcome the solar lack I need to apply an AC powered charger to the battery. Earlier, when using the 7 AH battery, I just floated the battery across the Kenwood 25 amp switcher and figured it would charge. That is pretty much right but if I forgot the battery and left it on the power bus for a more than a day, I expect that it may have been overcharged. Since the 7AH battery died an early death I was loath to do the same with a much more expensive battery.
After considering all of the expensive options such as a dedicated charger/switch like the West Mountain PWRGate (which wasn't exactly what I needed) I decided to go cheap. I put a SPDT switch in the solar side of the solar controller to switch between a power supply or the PV array. So I can now connect my Kenwood power supply to the solar controller and recharge the battery at the same maximum rate as the PV array. Since the solar controller is basically a 3-stage charger controller recharging the battery from AC is a whole lot less worrisome.
If I get with the project this winter I could actually use a PIC to sense the loss of sun and automatically change over to the AC-based power supply.
