I recently bought a Kenwood TH-D74 for hiking and APRS use. I had seen anecdotal complaints about the battery life around the web, but had not seen any real world data. So I setup a test and timed the battery performance.
I started with a fully-charged, stock 1800mAh battery.
Settings:
- Both bands enabled
- A Band set to 146.52
- B Band set to APRS
- Both Bands on HIGH power (photo was taken later)
- Beacon set to Auto, every 10 minutes
- Did not transmit on A (voice) band at all
- Bluetooth set to OFF
- Backlight set to OFF. Well, actually MANUAL (was turned on a total of 15 seconds to check battery levels throughout the day)
- GPS power set to Auto
- Very few (if any) beacons received
- Firmware 1.06
In short, nothing major was draining the battery other than the APRS beacon.
Result: 8 hours
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