TouCans and Battery Drain

Project TouCans is still on the air! I made a QSO with W2AZZ last night, and the rig was spotted in Europe again last night.

The rig has a bit of an issue in that the Pico-W drains its two AA batteries over the course of less that 12 hours. For POTA outings of a few hours, this won't really be an issue. For our POTA camping outings, this is a bit more of a problem. We're going to look into ways to have the Pico-W got into a semi-sleep mode via firmware. The plans I'm thinking of right now would entail the keyer turning off its WiFi and then checking back in say every two minutes for 30 seconds. Seems like kind of a reasonable tradeoff. I mean, I've had tube rigs that needed that long to warm up :)

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