Batboard

This post actually related to Kenwood TK-5400 battery rotation. We have, at work, five TK5400 radios. They, obviously, are not Motorola type IMPRES chargers. These radios typically sit in the charger all of the time. Essentially, they are used to monitor our local digital, trunked 800 MHz system.

I am trying to determine the bet way to "cycle" the batteries to, hopefully, extend the battery life. So far, I am thinking of having the dogwatch remove the radios from the charger and leave them on with the volume low. Then, the next night, have them re-insert the radios into the chargers. I am just looking for feedback to see what people think of or if they have a better idea of how to extend battery life.

These are NiMH batteries.

Buy a spare set of batteries. Run the radios on the desktops until the low battery alert, and then swap batteries. If that happens to coincide with the start of third shift every night, perfect.

If the radios are truly used for monitoring 24/7, you could always use a battery eliminator[1]. Keep the batteries in rotation with your other radios, and have one rotated in occasionally that you can throw on it when you need to take it out of the room.

[1] - https://www.osibatteries.com/p-22299.as ... th-dc-cord -- Random one found off the internet

Before we (my employer) switched to APXes from Kenwoods we replaced batteries annually. They lived in chargers on the trucks, got used for the duration of an incident, and went right back on the truck... precisely what IMPRES was designed for. More often than not they would also be left turned on in the chargers, which killed both batteries and chargers over (a short period of) time.

Your situation is not ideal and there is no good solution that won't result in prematurely-cooked batteries. If your local P25 system isn't Phase II you could look at the Unication pager... they can live all day long plugged into USB power, plus there's an amplified speaker base available.