Powering BB60C via external cell phone charger battery

Hi Signal Hound,

Our application has us walking around with our BB60C and a USB GPS unit plugged into a laptop for long periods, hopefully a full 8 h day of tromping around. The laptop battery is our sole power supply and the BB60 is a significant load. I was looking at the BB60’s Y-cable thinking this:

Can we extend the operating time our whole system if we stick the non-data leg of the Y-cable into one of these cell phone charger batteries?

I realize this will depend on a lot of things out of your control, but do you think I would break anything if I tried to test the idea?

Thanks,
DAN

I know of people who have tried this. The short answer is that you *might* break something as you could potentially back-power the USB, but I have not heard of anyone actually breaking something. If your charger puts out a clean 5 V, in theory it could extend your battery life if you had enough watt-hours in your charger. If it is not a clean 5V, it could do bad things, and it might do bad things when its charge runs out.

Does your laptop manufacturer make a higher capacity battery? Or a replaceable battery?

Dan

You could use a simple powered usb hub. Use a portable power pack to plug into the usb hub? BB60C plugged into USB hub too.

Just a thought while I’m searching the Forum 🙂

Jason

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