WARS Powerpole Kit

The WARS Powerpole Kit arrived on Monday.

The instructions point out that this isn't something for beginners - and they're right. Despite it not containing a lot of sensitive components, there is a lot of fine soldering to be done for the resistors and LEDs. Not a lot of space to get nice clean joints. 

I was able to get this together in about 2 hours - a lot longer than I thought, but it wasn't too taxing. 

I found the Andersons and fuses were a bit of a pain to keep in line, and I really should have got my head around how that jig worked, but alas.. I forgot it. And it shows. 

Once together, I gave it a quick check over the multimeter and it seemed to be OK. 

After my first assembly, I tried to straighten up the terminals, resulting in a couple of solder joins to let go. A bit of fiddling later and it was back and ready to go. Still hardly straight, and one set of poles is sitting higher than the rest.. but they were bastards to get down, so I've left them as is. 

Far from perfect but it works. 

An hour after this, and my radios and other accessories are now using power poles as well. I may need to run a slave unit just to deal with the accessories. 3 radios, 1 power meter and the RF Sensor switch, and I'm down to one spare socket. 

The old banana socket plate I made is still hanging off the wall - I need to do something about an ground bus. At the moment, that's just hooked up to the old banana socket. Once that's fixed and I get a bull nose plate to deal with all the coax and what not coming through the wall, I should be able to tidy all of the wiring up. 

I've got another length of 25A power cable coming to extend the IC-706's cable. Right not it's about 30cm too short to let me tidy it up.