Using a portable generator with Casablanca Kron

[satilla751]

We carry our Kron to football games and record the game straight into the Kron Friday nights. We are going to a stadium in 2 weeks that does not have room for us in the home side press box. We will have to set up on the visitor's side. We have a offer from a friend to provide a portable generator for our use. Do any of you know if this will create any problems other than the noise from the generator? Thanks.

[TimKennelly]

I am not sure how stable the voltage is from a portable generator or how that might affect the Kron.

I'd feel a lot more comfortable putting a UPS with AVR circuitry between the generator and the Kron to keep the voltage regulated.

[MartinWilson]

Although we have never used a portable generator we do take one of our Avio DV's all over the country to football matches (soccer to you guys in the US) and always take plenty of extension cables to try and hook up to the nearest mains point.

What I would add is that we have one permanently situated on our gantry at our home ground and earlier this year we had problems with the recording stopping due to "hard drive running slow". Now at the time we thought that the HDD was giving up on us so we tried another and this also had the same problem.

Now he have quite a bit of equipment on our gantry such as splitters, DVD recorders and monitors and these are run off several 4/6 gang extensions in tandem so we wired up the Avio to the mains directly off a single mains socket and since then we have not had any problems with the HDD (touch wood) so it would seem that having a number of items all linked to the same socket may have been draining some of the power to the Avio resulting in it stopping the recording. So I would suggest you need a very stable supply.

Having said all that you can bet your last dollar that it will return to haunt us at our next home game on Friday evening.

[LouBruno]

Outdoor portable generator + electrical surge from the generator+ our internal fragile power supply in the editing system=







Nice visit to tech support in Boulder.

[satilla751]

Thanks for your assistance. We will just record straight to the camera and I will download the game when I get home. It will be an all nighter, but I am up to it.