Monday 22nd April 2013

I got up at 2am this morning to work 160m into Europe. I picked up SM7BIC in Sweden but he faded before we could exchange details. I went back to bed about 4am and woke up very tired for work. For the first time in ages the wind had dropped so I went out to east arm and dug a ground radial from the 160m antenna out of the sea ice and straitened it out. The sea ice was so hard to dig with my ice axe I had to walk back to the transmitter building and get a small bar to help dig. It took me ages to dig the cable out and by the time I was finished my hands and arms were aching.

I found the fault with the blue Hag VHF antenna and fixed the problem. 75 ohm BNC pins had been put into the 50 ohm connectors…..doh !! I also fixed the faulty micro switch on the APANSA air filter door that has been giving trouble for a couple of weeks.

I finally sealed up all the gaps in 3 windows in the transmitter building that were letting in bliz and cold air. Every time I melted the ice away another blizzard would come. I tried about eight cartridges of silastic before I found one that wasn’t solid. I hope this makes a difference to the temperature in the building. I pumped about six cartridges of silastic into the frames so nothing should come through now.

I ran some new bliz lines down to the transmitter hut after the scary walk home last night, so I now have a rope 90% of the way. I might run another one near the operations building where there is nope rope.

I helped Chris with the gash run (Rubbish run) which was our Saturday duties that was not possible during the blizzard.

After work I tested my new 500 watt 6m amplifier I built to use for bouncing signals off the moon to communicate with people on the other side of the Earth. I managed to get all the software talking to the hardware as the whole system is fully automated and everything seems to be working well but the amplifier was getting unacceptably hot so I need to improve the cooling.

I put some calls out on 160m at sun set but got no answers.

The bliz gets into everything and it's so hard to keep it out