Sunday 17th November 2013

A bloody fire alarm went off in the emergency power house at seven am and everybody had to muster while Ashley and I had to go and investigate. It was a false alarm so all the sore heads went back to bed. A clear 60 knot blizzard turned into a white out 100 knot blizzard by the afternoon.

I adjusted the bias on the new tube in my amplifier and it tested all OK, but if I only had a radio to use it with, what a bummer. I decided to have one last look at my radio and I stripped it down again and I tried several different things to no avail. I needed some specialist test equipment we didn't have to calibrate it so I was screwed. I kept studying the circuit diagram and decided to have one last attempt. The PA was shutting down due to high swr even into a dummy load so it must have been a component failure in the swr bridge or the software has gone out of calibration.

I stripped down the radio for the 4th time and applied an earth to the reflected side of the swr bridge and hit the PTT and hey presto, full power. I had done the impossible again and got it working once more. The software power meter is still out of whack but who cares as long as it’s working, so VK0JJJ is now officially back on air. I tested the radio through my amplifier and it was putting out 2 kilowatts full steam so we’re back in business. 

I was pretty burnt out by now and so I went and had a spa, relaxing while reading my book for an hour and a half. After getting a few scraps together for dinner I went back to my room to clear all my emails and to write up my blog.

Saturday 16th November 2013

After doing ARPANSA I went down to the transmitter building to do the bias adjustments on my amplifiers new valve but discovered I hadn’t seated the valve correctly, so will have to wait another 24 hours now. I stripped down my Flex 5000 to try and get it operating. I tried bypassing a few things without any luck. The fault is either on the transmitter board, a logic fault or a software fault.

Unless it’s a software fault, there is no way I’m going to be able to fix it, so VK0JJJ is officially shut down and all the guys on 6m waiting to put Mawson in their log books will have to wait another thirty years. Disappointed, I went and had a spa. We had fish & chips for dinner tonight and later at Klub Katabatic an impromptu party broke out and it turned into a wild night.

Friday 15th November 2013

Today I made some more updates Geo-mag observation notes, made up some result sheets and sorted out a modification that has to be made for the fluxgate compass on the theodolite. In the afternoon I fixed a fault with the BGAN satellite phone. After work I installed the new valve in my amplifier and then left it to boil off impurities overnight, and then did some further testing on my faulty Flex 5000.

Thursday 14th November 2013

Finally I am starting to get on top of things after the busy past week with all the new people moving in. I spent quite a bit of time catching up with all my emails, doing ARPANSA and getting myself prepared to do geo-mag observations. I had to make quite a few changes to my geo-mag notes and I also made a few more changes to the geo-mag computer.

I sorted out all the spare hard drives we have and boxed them up and labelled them for easy access. We now have plenty of spares to get us through to V4 without worrying too much about the server crashing again. Late in the afternoon I went and did geo-mag observations. I was very tired by then and made a couple of silly mistakes which I rectified before sending off the results.

I have been praised for the accuracy of my results after such little training so I am happy with how things are going. It’s nice to be able to keep the data flowing after fifty nine years of continuous geo-magnetic observations here at Mawson, the longest continuous geo-mag data collection in the whole of Antarctica. It’s very tedious work which requires a lot of finesse and concentration and the absolute zero magnetic building is the oldest building on site having been brought to Mawson in 1954 from Heard Island and it smells like it too.

Wednesday 13th November 2013

Today I worked very hard doing auditing and re-ordering all day until I finally had it all finished. I did ARPANSA as Richard went out for a jolly with Helen. At smoko Theo from Aironomy gave me a faulty external hard drive to have a look at. The power supply was kaput and I spent an hour and a half making a new power supply only to find out the drive had a short circuit. When I gave it back to him he tells me he had the data backed up anyway.

After lunch I got to work on the geo-mag computer and setup wifi and installed Dimension 4 to automatically synchronize the time to a time server so I never have to adjust it manually. I also loaded some antivirus software so I can surf the net if I need to. The baslar landed again today with the remaining cargo and an extra chippie. My valve arrived within the cargo so that was exciting.

For the peoples night John the artist gave a talk on his art career which was very interesting and then he put a few cartons of Moo Brew over the bar which he designed the labels for, and we had a good chat late into the evening.

MAWSON SUN TIMES 

Last sunset 00:10 November 29th

Last sunrise 01:03 November 29th

First midnight sun 00:38 November 30th

Last midnight sun 00:58 January 12th 

First sunset 00:49 January 13th

First sunrise 01:07 January 13th

All times are Mawson basted time which is five hours ahead of GMT. Sunrise and sunset times can be affected by atmospheric conditions and by anything that sticks up above sea level (mountains, icebergs etc) and also by the observer’s height above sea level so allow a few minutes either side of the times given above.

At Mawson our time according to longitude is four hours and eleven minutes ahead of GMT so our local time is 49 minutes ahead of the sun which is why the ‘midnight sun’ does not occur at midnight.

John did a drawing for me of one of his Moo Brew labels. Maybe I could make a fortune on Ebay ?

Tuesday 12th November 2013

It was blowing about sixty knots today but the wind felt warm being only -1.5c. Richard did ARPANSA today so now we can alternate every week as I did with Chris which is good. I worked very hard doing auditing and re-ordering all day as I just want to get it finished and over and done with. Only five more pages to go and if I work hard tomorrow on it, I should get it all finished. Auditing always leads to cleaning and putting things away and there was plenty of that done.

While I was having lunch a cheeky Adélie penguin walked past the mess window. There is a few getting around station now. On the 12th November, we had a new record for the year; we had a maximum temperature of +4.5 C!
The previous hottest day of the year 2013 was on 18 January and we then had +04.0 C. The highest temperature ever at Mawson was + 10.6 C and was recorded on 9 January 1974.

After dinner we watched a couple of episodes of Home Land and I am starting to get hooked on it. Once again I worked on my blog till midnight to try and catch up.

Monday 11th November 2013

First thing this morning I got the remaining gear ready for the Tregoning project for John. Now that things had settled down a bit and there were no planes scheduled for today I started back on stock taking, auditing and reordering which led into more cleaning and throwing things out.

During the ARPANSA filter change I showed Richard what to do as well as running a QC check on the spare detector and for the rest of the week he will do it on his own. After smoko we had the Monday meeting followed by more stock taking, auditing, reordering and further cleaning........great stuff.

After lunch more stock taking, auditing and reordering. Richard gave me a hand on the computer hard drive section. By day’s end I managed to complete the computer section and the cables section and my brain felt like mush. I also changed the privileges of a few accounts on the server and setup a pager as well as making telephone directories and muster lists for the two muster stations. I also found a missing radio and swapped two others in the asset log. It was a very busy day with lots of VLV radio traffic as well and I will be glad when I finally get all this auditing and reordering completed.

The wind died down to nothing around six o’clock so Justin decided to take Lydie, Bianca, Richard and Stefan out for a walk on the sea ice after dinner and within a short time the wind came up to seventy plus knots and they had to go to ground and wait to be rescued by a Hag sent out. It was a good lesson to them all how quickly conditions can become life threatening.

One of the missing radio's thanks Keldyn