Field power solutions

UAV field operations need electric power, and lots of it, even if your bird is petrol powered.  Many operators first try to use their field support vehicle's starter battery to provide auxiliary power to their ground control station and their lipo chargers, until once at the end of the day the van doesn't start. I know, I've been to at least two demonstration flights where this actually happened, one time only half charged 4S lipo of the octo UAV was able to help, because the rest of the cars already left... Packing a second 100Ah work battery or running a generator is a suitable temporary solution, but it's certainly not the best, and it's surely not the cleanest.

The latest monocrystalline solar panels give you all the power you need out there. You don't need more than a couple of square feet of them to operate all the ground station hardware, and a few square meters can also run multiple lipo battery chargers continuously. Coupled with LiFePO4 or even traditional SLA batteries and a properly adjusted solar charge controller you can easily have multiple levels of power supply redundancy, and thus a very high level of added operational safety. Even if you are unlucky enough to have to fly in much less than fair weather, the solar panels still give you enough power to run your gear with the backup batteries bridging the occasional gap.

Most of our clients originally turn to us with their high end ground station needs, but we usually end up helping in many other areas with most of these projects. You don't have to buy our full power supply systems for this, and as you may all know, shipping batteries overseas nowadays is not a trivial task by itself, anyway. Instead, we'll give you all the help you need to build your own, providing you with calculations for system capacity, part sourcing options and schematics, so you'll be in full charge of your own power. 🙂