Red Cross Go Box Refurbishment

Red Cross Go Box Refurbishment
December 2025
Wayne and I were discussing the Red Cross Go Box and it has been sitting around for a long time and could use someone to go through it and verify it was still in working order. He also mentioned he would like to upgrade the power controller. Figure 1 shows the front of the Red Cross Go Box and Figure 2 shows the back of the Go Box. The Go Box currently uses an old solar controller and a special home brew battery interface, See the small white box on the bottom shelf of Figure 2. Wayne said he would like to install a new Epic Power Gate that would interface with several different battery types.

Figure 1. Front of the Red Cross Go Box. Figure 2. Back of the Red Cross Go Box.

I took the Go Box home, removed the rack trays, analyzed the current configuration and drew a schematic of the system to give me an idea where to place the new Epic Power Gate. Figure 3 shows the back of rack tray 2 which has the power distribution system mounted on back of the tray.

Figure 3. Power distribution system on the back of tray 2.

I removed the AC power connector and the two power pole connectors which were the input for the battery and solar panel. I then installed the Epic Power Gate on that section of the panel as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Epic Power Gate installed on the back of rack tray 2.

I then removed the old solar controller and battery interface hardware from tray 1 since their function was replaced by the Power Gate unit. The only hardware left on tray 1 was the KPC-3 packet controller. I decided to move it up to tray 2 which now put all the radio hardware on tray 2. I also rewired the system to use the Alnico 220 MHz for packet, since most of the county packet systems operate on 220 MHz. Figures 5 and 6 show the new configuration of the Red Cross Go Box. Figure 5 also shows the new switch added to the bottom right of the front panel. This switch controls battery power to the system.

Figure 5. Front of the new Red Cross Figure 6. Back of the new Red Cross Go Box Go Box.