TeamD Adventures

Electricity may be a fickle mistress but it is crucial in a car. Especially when the car is sporting four auxiliary lights (two PIAA 1400 fog lights and 2 PIAA 80 Pro XT driving lights), a Timewise 798a Rally Computer, a Yaesu FT8800 HAM Radio, a Garmin Nuvi 760 GPS, and any number of other things randomly plugged in to the aux jack or inverter. Stock batteries shudder at the load. Regular aux wires tremble, heat up, and fail. Bad things happen.

I tend to leave the mechanical side of the WRX to the professionals (sponsor alert). I have no aptitude for gears and lubricants and all those other things. I can, however, wire up a cat to a tennis racket and successfully blend margaritas from the result. Sure, I may obsess and over-engineer things a bit but I always say a wiring job done right is a wiring job that takes far too long to accomplish.

With that maxim in mind, I turn to power preparations for the Winter Alcan.

The battery has already been dealt with. Last year, after some pretty poor cranks on Thunderbird 2007, I decided to step up to an Optima Red Top. Unlike normal batteries, Optima batteries are built with a spiral cell technology that gives them more cranking power, better cold weather performance, deeper cycling, and allows them to work just as well upside down as right side up. This last part is probably not important to me as if the battery is upside down, most likely so is the car and at that point firing up the engine will be a ways down the list of my interests.

The lights have been serving me well for some years now. The fine fellows at Cascade Autorsport (makers of my safari light bar) installed them 3-4 years ago and they have survived reasonably well. One of the 80 Pro XTs has a cracked lens and both covers have been cracked by careless parking lot denizens who don’t see the lights sticking out farther than the hood but those are minor things. I’ve purchased a spare lamp and enclosure so I can swap one out if I lose them to rocks or moose. I am intending to get a spare 1400 for the same reason.

With the battery and lights previously sorted, I turned to the rest of the bits and pieces.

Marvin and I have been running the Timewise for a few years now. I’ve played with a number of wiring choices and for the last two years it has been fed directly from the battery. This insulates the unit from the rigors of on/off switching when the car is started and keeps it away from extraneous RF noise. It’s nowhere near as sensitive to RF as the Alfa Rally Computers but still, every bit of isolation helps.

I am adding the HAM radio to the mix now. Of all the in-the-cabin items, it has the highest draw. At 50W transmit it pulls 8amps or so. It needs bigger power leads than I already had in for the Timewise. So I know I need to run new power leads from the battery to the cabin to supply power to the radio.

And I have been playing with the radio’s final location.

In the past, before I had my license, we used Marvin’s Kenwood radio on a temporary basis. I had power running from the auxiliary jack and we tended to set the radio under the passenger seat with an external speaker under the Timewise mount. It worked but there were drawbacks. For one, when you turned the car off, you lost power to the radio and when you did that, it forgot what frequency it was on so when you next power up the car, you had to reset the frequency or you ended up broadcasting on 144.000Mhz and listening to dead air. For another thing, it was pretty hard to do anything on the radio as the control head was under the seat. We did get the remote head kit and that helped but it was never a permanent solution. Plus, I have my eye on that aux wiring for another application.

Now that I am all FCC-ified (K7YHF, thank you very much) I decided to by my own radio. The aforementioned Yaesu has dual transceivers so you can monitor/broadcast on two frequencies. Plus, it came with the remote head kit so we can see what we are doing.

For the first event, I plopped it under the seat and used the same wiring I had before. It worked but wasn’t ideal. My ultimate solution was to mount the unit in the trunk and have the head up front. It’s taken me a while to get to this but I am almost there. What have I done, you ask?… Just wait (continued).