Friday 14th March 2014

Today was bloody freezing, minus fourteen and blowing thirty knots. At eight o’clock it was all hands on deck to sort out all our RTA into bulk bags depending on its priority. So all the RTA we have packed all neatly into containers in various consignments had to be all emptied out, resorted, repacked and all itemised. It was a big job and on Monday we have to do the same for all our UPE. (Unaccompanied personal effects)

After lunch I took a bit of time out to sort some emails and I nicked over to the ANARESAT building to put the antenna tracking on manual to save power, then it was back to round two of repacking in the green store. In the afternoon I went and did this week’s geomagnetic observations and it was so cold walking over and back in only a work shirt. After five it was back to the red shed to do my washing, write up my blog and then early pizza night.

Thursday 13th March 2014

When I got up today it was minus fifteen and the Katabatic was blowing twenty knots as usual and when I wandered out for breakfast I was amazed to see nearly all the sea had frozen over overnight. This place can change in an instant. So I have now seen the full cycle. I don’t think we will see it break out again this year as its almost getting colder by the day. I spent the whole morning sorting out emails and doing a consignment to RTA the two transformers containing PCB’s as I want to try and make sure they are sent back to Hobart this voyage.

After lunch I went over to the green store to audit the equipment for the penguin monitoring project on Bechervaise Island and while there I packed some fire fighting equipment ready for RTA. Later I spent a bit of time trying to get my blog up to date as when the ship arrives I think after a few days of handover we all will be moved out to the ship to conserve fuel and food on the station. Normally we would have a microwave link out to the ship providing Internet service, but because the ship will be so far out we will not have any Internet until we reach Hobart, so no blog updates. 

There was a new development today. One of the expeditioners at Davis station needs to return home to sort out some personal business, so either two of our helicopters will have to be diverted to Davis to pick him up or the ship will have to go via Davis station on the return to Hobart to pick him up causing us a further couple of days delay.

The view yesterday

And the view today

Wednesday 12th March 2014

This morning it was minus thirteen and the Katabatic was blowing twenty knots. We were hoping to go boating over to Bechervaise Island to bring back all the rest of the biologists gear and rubbish that we left behind when we picked them up. This all depends on the wind as we are not able to operate over fifteen knots. The day turned out to be very busy. Now that we are doing a flying resupply, all our personal belongings and cargo has to now be removed from all the containers and separated due to its priority as most of the RTA will be left behind this year.

This is a major headache for our part time storeman John who has done such a great job getting everything ready to go, only to have to re-sort everything once again. I had to sort out the priority of all the comms gear returning to Hobart and I also had to raise a consignment for a heap of fire fighting equipment that has to be returned to Hobart only when it is replaced by equipment to be flown in. It was still blowing twenty knots after lunch so our boating was cancelled. 

It was freezing cold all day being around minus twelve. I had to find the box of my personal belonging in one of the containers that had some medication packed in it and my hands were freezing trying to open them. They were in the second box I opened so that wasn't too bad. This afternoon we had to shut down our server cabinet to do some wiring changes to the power that was a bit of a mess and also decommission the old VoIP server which meant we lost telephones and computers for a few hours. After the job interview on Monday, they have written back wanting a few references so I think I might have a foot in the door. I also had to do a communications plan for the helicopters as I will be provided a comms operator during the resupply to coordinate air traffic. After work I went and checked conditions on the radio and It wasn't so good today, although I did manage to make a few contacts to Zambia, Japan and Poland.

Tuesday 11th March 2014

I was pretty tired this morning and at nine am I had to attend our monthly SAR/Fire/Environment teleconference with all stations and Kingston. After this I went and did ARPANSA and at smoko we had our weekly meeting. After smoko I had to fill out some official forms to be the station electoral officer for the upcoming state elections in WA, Tas and South Australia. Not long after this we had a blackout and of course the ANARESAT tracking went into standby mode so I had to gear up and go for a wander over to the ANARESAT building to drive the antenna back onto the satellite and engage the auto tracking.

At the weekly meeting I discovered the fire roster had expired, so I went back to my room to make out a new fire roster to get us through to resupply. After some tomato soup for lunch I spent the whole afternoon doing aptitude and psychological tests online for a job interview I will have on Thursday. I think I did pretty well except for the accounting section that required lots of difficult percentage calculations that I was a bit rusty on. I could do all the calculations but all these tests were timed and I was too slow making sure I had all the right answers and I ran out of time. The last time I did one of these tests was way back in 1980 in the Melbourne Exhibition building when I tried out for a traineeship with the Department of Civil Aviation where I beat 1500 applicants to secure one of eight positions. I hope I'm the only applicant going for this job. 

After work I wandered down to the radio shack and conditions on 10m were pretty good. I made a few contacts into central Russia and Poland and then PowerSDR started to crash once again and I had to give it away and go for dinner. I really have to sort this issue out before we sail out of here as I am hoping to use my radio on the voyage back to Hobart.

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.

Sunday 9th March 2014

This morning I had a great and badly needed sleep in. After a few bits of old meat and a tin of sardines for brunch, I went and did ARPANSA a bit later than usual. Following this I went down to the transmitter building and the bands were going off. I had a long chat to a bloke in South Australia and then PowerSDR kept freezing requiring a complete cold restart. It was so unstable, I spent the next 4 hours working on my laptop trying to fix the problem which was so frustrating knowing how good conditions were.

I gave it away around seven o'clock and went back to the red shed for some dinner. There was absolutely nothing to eat so I made up some spicy fried rice which tasted great. 

After dinner I spent more time on my laptop cleaning up the hard drive, defragging the hard drive and running a virus scan. I finally got rid of some of the HP tools that are constantly running in the background hogging all the processor time and now it only takes about one minute and twenty seconds to boot up and the processor is hardly working at all now whereas before it was always running between 60% - 80%, sometimes up to 100% causing everything to slow or freeze. I also removed heaps of programs I never use or I don't want any more. While working on my laptop I was also updating my blog till one thirty in the morning.

Mawson February 2014 Climate Summary

Thirteenth month on station for the expeditioners of the 66th ANARE crew.

Temperatures - at Mawson during February we expect:

A mean maximum temperature of -01.4°C. The average maximum for the month was -01.4°C. The lowest maximum was –07.2°C and the highest 01.7°C.

A mean minimum temperature of -07.3°C. The average minimum for the month was -07.4°C. The lowest minimum was -12.9°C and the highest -04.4°C.

The coldest temperature for any February day on record at Mawson was -17.3°C on 28/02/1985.

Wind:

The average daily wind run (the measure of how many kilometres of wind pass the station in 24 hours) was 1048 km per day for the month. This is well above the long term average of 947 km per day.

The maximum wind gust for February was 130 km/h from the ESE recorded on the 18th. The record gust for February is 194 km/h recorded on 26/02/1999.

One blizzard occurred during the month, with 0.8 events expected

There were 24 gales compared to 11.7 expected for the month, 28 days of strong wind, with 26.0 the average. 8 days of snowfall were observed, which is way above than the expected average of 5.0 days. We had 4 days of Blowing Snow (Vis <1km).

Note: A Strong Wind day has wind in excess of 41 km/h and a Gale is wind in excess of 63 km/h.

Sunshine

We recorded a total of 213.9 hours of sunshine for the month.
The long term average is 215.6 hours.

Conclusion:

February was pretty much in line with the long term mean temperatures but was windier; not in terms of max wind speed but in wind run. Every day of the month we had gale force winds. We experienced an above average number of snow days.

Saturday 8th March 2014

This morning I was up at five am to fix the tracking on the ANARESAT as we had a power outage over night and it lost the signal from the satellite. After sorting out the satellite issues I had to get the assistance of Dave from ARPANSA in Melbourne who was at Phillip Island watching the races. He’s a top bloke and nothing seems to phase him and he walked me through a few software changes and in no time I had the main gamma ray detector back on line ready to go.

Finally I got to have a coffee and take a break but I still had to do my Saturday duties which were to clean out the stinking smokers hut. No one smoked this year which was great. Upon entering the smokers hut I immediately started dry reaching as the smell was so intense. As usual the hut was full of shit and I filled the back of the ute with all the crap I removed taking half down to the RTA skip and the rest down to warren to be burnt. Now those dirty basteds have some chairs, a couple of lighters and a huge ashtray, I mean what more do you want? Oh, I left them with a clock as well. 

By now it was past one on my day off and it was time for some lunch. There was nothing to eat so I scrounged a few scraps together and then headed down to the transmitter building and once again the bands were going nuts. I had over seventy contacts all around the world and for the first time many of them were on ten meters FM to Australia, Japan and New Zealand which were the furthest contacts I have ever made on ten meters FM.