Tuesday 31st December 2013

Today was cold and windy, blowing about thirty knots all day. I worked pretty hard all day trying to knock over a few things on my list. After ARPANSA, I went and did magnetic observations which went well. When I got back, I sent off the results and then edited my notes again and then grabbed my aerial analyser and a heap of bits and pieces and headed off up the hill to the transceiver hut to finish testing all the antennas.

 Out of seven antennas I found four of them to be faulty. Three of them are high up the tower. After this I went back to the workshop to write up some notes and then I went down to the transmitter building to install a TURF file in my radios firmware to correct the band edges for Region three. The file installed fine, but unfortunately it didn’t change anything, but I think I have to do a factory reset to activate the changes and I am worried if I do this I will lose all my configuration changes and have to change everything back again. I’ll leave this job for Ron. (Lateron) 

While there I sent this month’s log files to Jon my QSL manager and to Steve my LoTW manager. Thanks Jon and Steve, you are both saving me a LOT of work. Afterwards I went back to my room to start sorting out all the movies, documentaries and TV series on all my hard drives. Some of the guys are upstairs now setting up all the band equipment for tonight’s celebrations so I better go and offer a hand. The plan is to party until the sun goes down.

On another note, Jose the deiso was servicing one of the cranes and up underneath between the chassis he found a bird’s nest that had been there since the crane was delivered over two years ago. So much for bio security washing our boots and picking fluff out of our Velcro on our jackets.