West Mountain Radio Super PWRgate PG40S

[W1GUH]

I picked on up at the factory in Norwalk, CT, last Friday, and this review is mostly of the company. I haven't used it enough to know yet how it performs, I just got it setup & I'm charging a gel cell right now, so all I can say is that yep, it's charging the battery at what looks like the proper current.

But when I visited the company to pick it up last week, I was pretty impressed with the people working there. I went during lunch hour and they were all sitting around a table in the workshop/lab eating lunch and were a great bunch of people. The guy who took care of me even had to make one of the cables, while I waited, that I needed. Well, OK, all he had to do was crimp in a fuse holder for the battery cable but still, the service was exemplary. They do hamfests in the NE, and if you're interested, you can probably find one of there to talk to.

Finally, the reason I went this "deluxe" just to charge a battery, after all, the PWRgate is also for use to make a 12V UPS, is that by necessity, I'm doing battery charging in my apartment and need to take every precaution I can to avoid the "fun" a hydrogen-charged atmosphere could cause. I discussed this with them and was assured that what I'm doing is very safe to do indoors.

Oh, the guy that took care of me had an operational ICOM radio in his office AND a DX-20 sitting on the windowsill!

[W1GUH]

Now that I've lived with the Power Gate and the What Meter since the intro post, they've been behaving and working exactly how West Mountain's web sit says they will. I've been charging a Gel Cell through the Power Gate with an Astron SS-30M, and as far as I can tell, the Power Gate has performed flawlessly. The LED indicators for the state of charge are very informative, and seem to be saying the truth, as observed on the current meter on the Astron, and the What? Meter. That meter is a really good thing when charging batteries. It tells you the voltage, the value and polarity of the current, and it calculates Watts, Watt-Hours, and Amp-Hours, giving you a good picture of what's going on with the battery...charging & dis-charging.

I acknowledge that these units are expensive & there are cheaper ways to charge gel-cells, but if you need to do that safely, these units from West Mountain are a must, at least for peace of mind. It's comforting to see that I'm not stressing the battery when I charge it inside. It wouldn't be a good thing to be generating Hydrogen here!

BTW...about AGL batteries. West Mountain's literature says that you really should charge them with a higher voltage, and need to make a simple mod to the Power Gate (Move a jumper). But in a conversation with one of them at a hamfest, the words were, "You don't really need to do that. It'll give you a slight improvement in the charge of the battery, but it's not really a big enough difference to force the changes to the PS and the Power Gate.