The School House Peak fire lookout tower.
The Yurok Tribe needed telecommunications access for the upper end of their Reservation, located in a deep and inaccessible canyon along the Klamath River. Their solution included a microwave repeater station on a remote mountaintop. The repeater ran on solar electric power, with a SERC fuel cell as an automated backup. The fuel cell operated in this application for nearly four years, accumulating over 7,000 hours of total run time. Land line telecommunications eventually replaced the microwave system, but the project provided the Tribe with a valuable interim solution and gave SERC a chance to test our technology in an unattended application operating under a wide and unpredictable range of conditions.
To learn more about this project, see the following papers.
Fuel Cell/Photovoltaic Integrated Power System for a Remote Telecommunications Repeater, June 2002. (PDF)
