hand held cb radio with a charging port and nimh aa'a

i bought a hand held uniden cb radio 15 years ago. i still get it out once in a while and use it. the problem is it takes 10 rechargeable aa batteries. has anyone looked at todays battery chargers? it's tough enough to find one that charges more than 4 batteries. i know there are some out there that charge 8 but they're hard to come by. besides that, i need one that charges 10 at a time.
on to my question, this cb radio was built i assume before they had invented nimh batteries. at the time we had nicads. this radio has a built in charge port on it so you could charge nicads in about 8 hours in the radio. what about nimh's? can i charge nimh's in this radio or will it explode?

Contact Uniden and ask.

My guess is that their charger is simply so many mah and the charge time is varied for battery capacity, so nicad or nimh will make no difference. Just don't overcharge it.

If you only get it out once in awhile to use it, what's the problem with charging the batteries in stages?

:buddies:

My first guess... Is that this is a very simple, low current battery charger...

Back then, where NiCads around 900 mAmpHours? And the new NiMH are 2,000 mAH and above?

The spec. for the NiCAD based charging was 8 hours...

The rate with NiMH:

2,000 * 1/900 * 8 hours = 18 hour charge rate

At rates below C/10--There is not too much chance of damaging the batteries...

When I want time charge (or trickle charge) something with a "dumb" charger (car battery, lead acid battery in a toy, etc.), I get a simple mechanical lamp timer.

The timers with the removable timer stops--You can set the timer to turn off after (up to) 24 hours (just leave the "stop" clip in).

Or, you can set it to turn on (for example) 1 hour out of every twenty-four hours to keep the batteries topped off, without worry about overcharging.

My car batteries are much happier after I have done this when I keep the "gas guzzlers" parked for months at a time (some of the cars have Lojack, On-Star, GPS, computers, etc.) that keep sucking power (180 mAmps on one car)--and after a few weeks of being parked, the batteries are really prone to damage/dying.

-Bill

okay, i have a basic understanding of amp hours and such. i understand the theory that a larger amp hour battery would take longer to charge. i guess what it boils down to is can the batteries physically be charged in the radio? what is the difference between a charger that can charge nicad batteries versus a charger that can charge nimh batteries? i sent an email to unidens support dept. friday. i could charge the batteries sepparate. it's a little inconvenient in the sence that i have to be mindfull to change out the batteries 3 times.