What battery chemistry are you planning to pair with your panels ? lifepo4 has pretty much become the standard for field work nowadays due to weight and steady voltage.

Investing in a well-shielded MPPT controller (like a Genasun or Victron) and putting ferrite chokes on the DC lines makes a world of difference if you want to listen or transmit on low power while charging your battery at the same time.

OH8STN's site is definitely the gold standard when it comes to field solar setups for ham radio! His video breakdowns on man-portable power kits saved me a lot of trial and error.

One practical tip I would add for operating HF/VHF with solar in the field: be very careful with cheap PWM solar charge controllers or lower-end MPPTs. Many budget controllers emit massive amounts of RF noise (QRM) across HF bands as soon as they start charging.

One quick detail for anyone planning to attempt this mod: make sure you save your alignment settings or write down the soft-cal menu values before doing a full master reset. Sometimes opening up the wideband transmit can reset factory calibration values on certain firmware revisions.
Thanks again for sharing the exact link for the 818.

You're completely spot on about the board layout differences. The FT-818ND main board has minor revisions around the microprocessor area compared to the older FT-817ND, especially regarding the jumper layout. A friend of ours tried using an old 817 diagram on an 818 a while back and almost bridge-soldered the wrong SMD pads.

Thanks for digging up that link Davys, that's super helpful.

I tried asking ai tools for advice on this, but the responses were completely theoretical and ignored field constraints like real-world signal attenuation and power limits. I'd much rather get feedback from people here who actually test their equipment in the field.
To give a concrete example of what we are trying to run, we did a quick dry run yesterday loading heavy interactive platforms like trixino casino over a weak signal, and the packet loss caused constant session timeouts. That's why we are really looking for a proper hardware solution. Thanks in advance for your help.

These web platforms require a continuous, secure HTTPS connection with low latency. Standard mobile tethering often drops packets in low-signal areas, which resets the active sessions and corrupts the test data. We are evaluating whether carrying a small dedicated 4G/5G battery router with a directional antenna is worth the extra weight and power draw compared to basic phone hotspots.

For those of you who operate or test gear in remote areas, how do you maintain a stable connection for bandwidth-sensitive or session-heavy websites without draining your battery storage in a day ? Do you rely on external antenna boosters, or are there specific low-power network setups you would recommend ?

Hi everyone. Following my introduction, I'm looking for some practical feedback regarding off-grid data connections.

My partner and I are organizing a ten-day remote stay next season. On the communications and power side, we have our basic radio setup and solar panels ready thanks to the helpful threads on this board. However, we face a specific logistical issue: my partner needs to stay connected periodically to run live diagnostic tests and monitor interactive web dashboards for work.

As many know, due to health problems and death, the wonderful site QRPguys.com has closed its business. 

There is some good news, though. One of the QRPguys has a different site, selling many of the products and supporting historical producs through a library of documentation, construction manuals and etc. online.

LINK:     QRP Builders

de RadioRay  ..._ ._