Tuesday 3 September 2013

Tuesday 3rd September 2013

Because Chris was away, today I had to print the news papers and cross words which I hate doing. It takes quite a while but at least I can do it from my room. After smoko I did ARPANSA and then did my usual morning duties. After lunch I repaired my power supply and it’s now working fine, so tomorrow I will check my amplifier and make the bias adjustments if all is working OK and then I will be back in business on 6m once again.

It was a really nice day outside with zero wind and about minus twenty six degrees but 100% cloud cover. At four o’clock I went and did the weather balloon flight with Luc our senior MET officer. He ran through the procedure with me and then he let me release the hydrogen balloon carrying the radiosonde. We watched the balloon float up to a couple of thousand meters and then we went inside and followed the flight watching all the data being displayed on a computer. It was very interesting watching the temperature drop down below minus seventy and the high upper atmosphere winds. The balloon finally burst at an altitude of 25,600 meters and all this information is sent to the BoM to aid in their weather forecasting. Today was Geoff’s 66th birthday so after dinner we celebrated his birthday with a cake and a bottle of Vodka.





Radiosonde with GPS and UHF transmitter


Luc our senior MET officer


Happy 66th birthday Geoff

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5 comments:

  1. Anonymous4 September 2013 at 17:03

    Hi Craig
    I see you have some serious weather coming your way Sunday into Monday. Here in Melb we've had an unusually warm start to Spring, with day-temps between 21-25C, and everything is suddenly starting to grow. The sound of suburban lawn-mowers and smell of cut grassis something you'll have forgotten about??
    Cheers
    PeterSt

    ReplyDelete
  2. Craig Hayhow4 September 2013 at 23:35

    Hi Peter,

    I'm hoping this weekend might bring us the 100 knot blizzard we have been waiting for. In Antarctica there are no smells at all (including penguin rookeries)and when you walk into the hydroponics building the beautiful smell of the plants is overwhelming. No I haven't mist lawn mowing at all :)

    Regards,

    Craig

    ReplyDelete
  3. Arthur Blackwell8 September 2013 at 03:48

    Fingers crossed for the amplifier, hope it's ok.
    Mowing lawns also when I discovered a serious water line rupture at the bottom of my garden, I suspect many hundreds $$$$$ of wasted water and it was on my side of the meter --- SOB!

    Thanks to a volunteer fire fighting crew shutting their fire hydrant off way too quickly and causing the dynamic head to spike way higher than the pressure that the old poly line was designed for, can't prove it so guess who will have to cough up?

    I am now in the process of isolating that part of my water line and will be fitting a pressure relief valve as well, hope that stops any more problems.

    Cheers Arthur
    VK7KBA

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous8 September 2013 at 15:03

    Well Craig, according to the records the wind peaked out at just over your 100 knot target yesterday. Talk about extreme weather...hope no one had to go outside!
    Cheers
    Peter

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Craig Hayhow8 September 2013 at 23:20

      Hi Peter,

      Most of us had to go out at some stage. I went out twice, once for work and the second time I went down to the transmitter building wearing a motorcycle helmet with a video camera mounted on top and I filmed the grueling walk there and back. It's pretty awesome footage.

      Regards,

      Craig

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