Charge capacity is specified as 1550 mA-hr, which is about 25% less than that of a standard alkaline AA cell or the Sanyo Eneloop rechargeables that I usually use in my handheld recorders. A freshly charged PaleBlue cell has a terminal voltage of 1.47 volts under a 100 mA load, slightly lower than an alkaline cell, but the claim (and I verified this – details later) is that, unlike an alkaline cell whose terminal voltage drops slowly but continuously during use until it finally peters out, the PaleBlue has a very flat discharge curve which drops off like a cliff at the end of its discharge cycle.
every time I looked at it. With the Eneloop NiMH cells that I usually use with this recorder (they hold a charge on the shelf for several months), the battery indicator drops to two bars within the first two hours, then drops to one bar at around six hours, and finally quits after eleven hours and a few minutes. The difference in operating time is consistent with the difference in specified capacity in Ampere-hours, so here, theory and practice agree pretty well.
But . . . and there’s always a “but” – I figured that in order to maintain the efficiency of the primary voltage source, it must be a switching-mode voltage regulator - and switching regulators can radiate electromagnetic energy if they’re not well filtered and shielded. Since I was most likely to use these batteries in a portable digital recorder, I wanted to see if radiated EMI (electromagnetic interference) was going to cause a problem.
When it’s discharging under load, all hell breaks loose. The period of the sawtooth wave gets shorter and shorter (frequency gets higher) as the load current increases. And with increasing load, another frequency shows up riding on the leading edge of the sawtooth. This is what’s coming out of a cell other than the DC voltage, when it’s loaded with 15Ω (100 mA). The sawtooth, which now looks more like a triangle, is about 30 mV peak-to-peak amplitude at 225 kHz
I waved a PaleBlue around the radio case and antenna and found that it produced a distinct buzz with the radio tuned to a dead spot on the low end of the dial, a sound expected from a sawtooth waveform. The buzz became audible when the battery came within about six inches from the antenna. When loading the battery with a 15Ω resistor, (a 100 mA load), it produced a strong hiss with the radio tuned to a dead spot near 1 MHz. This is consistent with the frequency of the sine waves riding on top of the sawtooth that you see in the ‘scope photo.