This might be good for a station remote.
Dave Wilson of CEA, who writes a column in Radio World from his perspective as both a station owner and consumer electronics guy, spotted a cool item at CES last month, the PowerShade solar field shelter from PowerFilm. It's a tent, the top of which has thin, flexible solar panels woven into it.
The company says the panels are durable. They can be walked on, and if one of them gets punctured, only the solar generating capacity in the immediate vicinity of the puncture is lost, not that of the whole rectangular panel.
The PowerShade would be cool for a remote broadcast. The 1 kW version costs $25,000, which includes the tent, the inverters for the solar panels and everything. It's pricey, but perhaps a worthwhile marketing expense if you're positioning your station as a green operation, he notes.
See the rest of Dave's observations in the March 1 issue of Radio World.
|