Love Machine
NES Member
So recently the Grand Caravan decided to shit a transmission and now I have a brand spanking new Subaru Forester with a manual transmission. Now I have to redo the entire CB and ham setup that I was carefully cultivating on the van. Yay.
One thing that I have never been comfortable with is running a wire directly to the car battery. For one thing, I hate poking new holes in the firewall grommets. In addition to that, I would love to have a backup battery, so that in case of an emergency I could power off it and not drain the car's main battery. Now the subie has an auxiliary lighter circuit with a 5A fuse that goes to the middle compartment between the driver and passenger. I'm thinking that if I stick a 20Ah 12V bicycle/motorcycle battery right there, it should not draw more than 2A to charge, will smooth out the power to feed the ham and cb, and if necessary I can install a kill switch that will power the accessories off the auxiliary battery only.
Thoughts?
One thing that I have never been comfortable with is running a wire directly to the car battery. For one thing, I hate poking new holes in the firewall grommets. In addition to that, I would love to have a backup battery, so that in case of an emergency I could power off it and not drain the car's main battery. Now the subie has an auxiliary lighter circuit with a 5A fuse that goes to the middle compartment between the driver and passenger. I'm thinking that if I stick a 20Ah 12V bicycle/motorcycle battery right there, it should not draw more than 2A to charge, will smooth out the power to feed the ham and cb, and if necessary I can install a kill switch that will power the accessories off the auxiliary battery only.
Thoughts?