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Professionally, I’m a retired professor of accounting and former chair of the School of Accounting at the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business. My academic work explored how people make decisions in complex systems, especially when information is imperfect or overwhelming. I’ve published in a fair number of journals that few people read voluntarily, and I spent decades thinking about how technology shapes human behavior. These days, my time is divided between managing a small flock of chickens, herding goats, chatting on amateur radio (KO4LMP), and living just on the edge of the grid—literally and metaphorically. I’m a father to five daughters, a grandfather to 17, and a great-grandfather to three. Somewhere along the way, I realized that what I enjoy most is simply talking about the world we live in—and how to make sense of it.

📻Using a Boost Buck to Maintain Steady Voltage for Mobile Radio

I asked ChatGPT:

You helped me with a regulator that maintains a constant voltage for my truck and mobile radio, but I can’t remember what it is. Can you help?

ChatGPT said:

I think I remember the conversation, even though I can’t retrieve the exact model.

We were talking about using a buck-boost DC-DC converter rather than a simple voltage regulator so your mobile radio would always see about 13.8 V, regardless of whether the truck battery was at:

  • ~12.2–12.8 V with the engine off,
  • ~13.5–14.8 V while charging.

I believe the specifications we settled on were approximately:

  • Input: 9–36 V DC (or 7–40 V on some models)
  • Output: Adjustable, set to 13.8 V
  • Current: 20 A continuous (to give plenty of headroom for your radio)
  • Type: Buck-boost (step-up/step-down), not just a buck converter.

Note: I have used this gadget now for about a year and it is rugged (not plastic) and so far, it has worked perfectly. I had put a voltage meter on my truck before the buck booster, and it sometimes read as high as 15.5v which is outside my radio’s specified tolerance. Not good. This little gadget has solved the problem; voltage is now a constant 13.9v even when the truck is off.

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