Thursday 5th September 2013

Today was around minus eight, very little wind and overcast.
I decided to repair my power supply. How hard could that be?

I replaced a resistor that was 30% out of specification and narrowed down the fault to a transistor. Of course we didn't have one down here so I had to try and find an equivalent one to try. It took me over an hour just to strip the bloody thing down to replace the transistor and about the same to put it all back together again and guess what? Same bloody fault.

So I strip it all back down again and decide to replace the other transistor and then put it all back together again and guess what? Same bloody fault although it was working a bit better. So I strip it all back down again and decide to replace the transistor I just replaced with a different type. So I put it all back together again and this time it seemed to be working much better but it wasn't allowing any adjustment but it was regulating when I placed a load on it so I thought I had finally has success.

In the late afternoon I carried the bloody heavy thing back down to the transmitter hut and hooked it up to my amplifier and powered it up. All the lights and fans came in and all was looking pretty good, that is till I transmitted and the bloody thing died again. How disappointing after all that hard work.

I fired up my radio and the band was very quiet. I put out a few calls using Olivia and a bloke in Japan answered me. We had a good chat and then I gave it away for the night.

 I decided to take my amplifier back to the workshop and install another type of power connector so I could use one of the power supplies in the work shop to power it so I can fix my power supply at my leisure as I need to focus on getting the auditing and reordering completed.

Tonight's foreign movie was funny but a bit weird. It was a French comedy. What spoilt it was the French talk too fast and it was very difficult to keep up with the sub titles and watch the movie at the same time. Afterwards we watched three episodes of Tailor park boys. That show is so funny I hang out all week to see it.