"Bill Kearney" wrote:

Do those small black and white tv's work? How much power? How do you
power
one? Battery?

20" Sharp Aquos, 12vDC. DVD player with it's audio looped into the Clarion
head unit. Video out goes to the TV and the Raymarine E-80 chartplotter.
Video on the chartplotter is basically pointless on our particular setup but
I connected it "because I could". The audio looped to the radio really
improves watching movies. MUCH better sound than the speakers on the TV
itself.

We have two TVs on board - one for the main saloon and one for the aft
cabin (where we sleep).

The one in the aft cabin is a dual voltage color TV/VCR combo. It is
hooked to the follow-me antenna for the Direct TV satellite dish. It
is a little bigger than the dual voltage one we got for our son when
he was driving flatbed trucks all over the US.

We also have a regular old shore power TV in the main saloon, but we
don't use that one unless we are at a marina. It is also hooked to
the satellite.

While I have your attention :: how much power does a laptop take up?

It varies quite a bit between different laptops. There are also different
ways to power them. You can either use an inverter and the normal power
brick, or get one designed to run off 12vDC. The latter generally consume
less wattage, and are also usually quite a bit smaller/lighter than the
regular AC power brick.

You can also get 12v power bricks for some of them designed to run off
the cigarette lighter outlet in the car. Even with that, they still
put out a lot of interference if you are going to run the SSB.

Also, how long will a laptop run before it is out of juice?

My ancient 1ghz Toshiba runs about 2 hours, but the wife's tiny little Sony
gets 8 hours.

It depends not only on the power draw and the size of the batteries
relative to that, but also on the state of the batteries. My mom's
old laptop has no rechargeablity left and will not run on the
batteries at all. My old laptop will last about a half an hour or 45
minutes where it used to be able to go almost 2 hours. This one with
newer batteries will last 2 hours or more.