Wednesday 1st May 2013

Today is monthly report day. It's a hell of a lot of work to put together the monthly report for very little benefit, but it's got to be done so I had better get stuck into it. After a while I needed a break so I decided to do a station walk around and check all the buildings and masts I am responsible for. I started off back at the ANARESAT building that I dug out yesterday and I was depressed to see it already had 30cm cover. I think from now on Chris & I will be taking turns every Monday to dig it out.





Wouldn't that rot your socks



I slid down to the receivers building and it was fine, but I couldn't get back out as the bliz was too high. It took me quite a while to get back out and from now on I will have to carry an ice axe so I can dig steps.



The transceiver building was fine and while there I rewired the station web camera so it is now on UPS power then I carried the really heavy oil heater back to the Cosmic ray building. Cos ray was fine and so were the towers. I took a couple of photos of the huge ice fall from a couple of days ago and by now it was blowing forty knots and minus eighteen and my thighs were burning so I legged it back to the red shed for smoko.

The large ice fall off to the west

I finally got my monthly report off and then replaced Cookies radio with one of the newer models and then went back outside to replace the bliz line across the bridge leading to the Operations building. The wind howls across this bridge like you wouldn't believe and the bliz line is on the wrong side of it and disappears under a meter of snow. I wonder how many people have complained about this over the years and all this time no one has done anything about it?

After work I had organized an EME sked with Lance W7GJ in Montana where we would attempt to bounce radio signals off the moon to talk to each other. This was my first attempt ever and is seen as the wholly grail of radio transmission because of the distances and complexity involved. Unfortunately it was a complete disaster with me pointing in the wrong direction (I couldn't see the moon) and Lance had my location wrong. Better luck next time but EME is very complicated and extremely difficult to achieve.