IC-7300 Clock Battery

The rechargeable clock battery in my Icom IC-7300 eventually stopped holding enough charge between uses. I am cheap and I turn off electrical items when I am not using them.  This hastened the demise of the stock battery. Because the original cell is surface-mounted and the charging circuit complicates replacement with an ordinary coin cell, I explored a few practical ways to preserve the radio’s clock without making a risky modification.

I am going the route of a non-rechargable battery.  That procedure has the least time with a soldering iron on surface-mounted electronics.  Some people just do without, but I do find that I use the zulu-hour clock from time to time, and sometimes I go into the logs to figure out a contact that I made. Without a charged battery, those logs are all from the year 2000.

In order to use a unrechargable button battery, I had to find a Schottky diode to keep current from recharging what could not be recharged (in this case a CR 2032 battery). Once again a Twin Cities institution came to the rescue: Ax-Man in St. Paul has discrete components usually under a dollar. It is the last electronics surplus store standing in the area, and we are lucky to have it.  Sure enough, they had a 1N5817 in a bin and I bought two of them.  The button holder I bought from Amazon, no doubt from China.

This is a work in progress.  I am having too much fun with the 7300 to take it off line at the moment (see SDR-Control cat server).