An ice fishing box to house my ic-7000, an atu, a battery pack. Very crude but solid rack made of pine board I had laying around. This is cobbling of the best sort.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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I personally don't think it's redneck engineering. Redneck engineering must include bondo in some shape or form, IMHO.
The first thing that comes to mind is airflow. It would be trivial to tape up some 25mm 12v fans for just a bit of circulation. Nothing massive or noisy would be needed, just something to blow over the radio and batteries would work well.
Heat will obviously travel up and out, but a little bit of coaxing never hurts.
A fan or two into that gap below the radio is one of the improvements on the block. Together with a voltmeter for the battery.
Put the volt-meter in series with a switch or momentary button. They tend to draw a little power, so you don't want it draining your battery when you are not using it. If you stick a cig (accessory) port in there too, you could plug in other things, or a usb charger or whatever if needed. I've used my pota battery to run a small 12v air compressor, for instance.
I have a master switch on the power cable before the fuses even. I lost a couple of expensive lipo batteries when I forgot to disconnect them and put the radios away for a few months.