Monday 10th March 2014

This morning it was minus twelve degrees and the katabatic was blowing thirty eight knots. I woke up early and very tired from a late night working on my blog, but I had to get up as I had a job interview on the video conference at ten o'clock and I wanted to be prepared for it. The interview went very well I though. After some lunch, I went for a walk up to the transceiver hut to try and find out why the Katabatic FM transmitter wasn’t working. I reset the audio streamer and the transmitter and then walked back to the red shed to test it, but it was still not working.

I then found out someone had turned off the computer (to save power), so I turned it back on and then went back to my room to see if the radio was working and it wasn’t. So I went back to the computer and reset the audio streamer and then went back to my room to see if the radio was working and it wasn’t. As today is a public holiday I thought bugger it, I will sort it out tomorrow so I went down to the transmitter hut and tested my laptop I was working on last night and today it appeared to be working fine, although the PowerSDR program did freeze up about four times again which I still need to sort out. The bands were running hot again and over a few hours I made over sixty contacts all around the world. Later I had a bit of the fried rice I cooked up yesterday for dinner and then worked on my blog for a while.

Not much has been happening with the sea ice. Although all the sea ice around the station has blown away, it is only a very tiny area when you view the satellite image, so at this stage we are still looking at a flying resupply using four AS350B3 Squirrel helicopters. The icebreaker Aurora Australis left Hobart last night and should reach the sea ice out from Mawson around the 20th March depending on the weather.