Monday 27th January 2014

Today was the Australia day public holiday so I enjoyed a bit of a sleep in before getting up and doing all my washing.

After lunch I had an open day down at the magnetic quiet zone. This area is normally out of bounds to everyone except me so it was a chance for everyone to go down and have a look around the area which contains the Variometer building, the absolute magnetic hut (circa 1950’s) and the automatic tide gauge all of which I am responsible for. It’s a nice area right on the fringe of the station fronting East bay. The area had a nice river and waterfall for the past few weeks and it was so nice to hear flowing water but it’s almost frozen over now and down to a trickle. I found a few bullet casing while I was wandering around there.

After this I went for a long walk around station and then went down to the trade’s workshop to use the lath to make a couple of parts for my ice axe project. After dinner we watched two episodes of Home Land series three.

Trades workshop

Sunday 26th January 2014

Today I had a bit of a sleep in and took things easy all morning. I cooked a Fray Bentos pie for lunch seeing it was Australia day and it was bloody great, what an amazing invention. After lunch I got ready for the field trip leaving tomorrow and once I was sorted I got some gear organised and went fishing out on West arm.

I thought I could find access to some deep water there but it wasn't too good. There is deep water as the cliffs fall straight down in places but the sea was frozen over so I had to find a huge rock to smash through the sea ice to get my line in. I couldn't get out from the cliffs and I didn't get a bite the whole time, but it was relaxing and I enjoyed the solitude and the warm sun. There was no wildlife and the silence was deafening.

That was my Australia day. Late in the afternoon I went down to the radio shack and had a few contacts including a couple from Queensland who I had a long chat with who were celebrating Australia day. Dinner was a lamb on the spit which was a bit raw and after this we watched coast and then a crazy Australian movie that wasn't too bad.

Saturday 25th January 2014

Richard was out climbing today so I had to do the papers and then do ARPANSA followed by my washing and then Saturday duties. I spent a few hours on the radio as conditions were pretty good even with one hundred watts I worked many stations. I mostly worked Australian stations but also Cook Islands, Papua New Guinea and Japan with a few EU stations mixed in.

Later I had a few coldies with Luc before having a roast dinner cooked by Paul. Luc and I watched a few documentaries and shot the shit till late.

NEWS FLASH !!

Houston; we have a problem.........

The sea is still frozen out to a distance of 30 miles and then there is heavy pack ice out another 20 miles preventing the ship reaching us. It was to come and get us first and then go onto Davis and then Casey before returning to Hobart, but now they are going to go to Casey and Davis first and hope the extra couple of weeks will break out our sea ice and they can pick us up last.

If the sea ice doesn't break out, they will leave us here and return to Hobart to get helicopters to try and fly us out. So, with plan one the ship won't get here till the 19th Feb and if they have to go back and get helicopters they won't get here until 1st April.

We are a couple of weeks past the summer solstice so things are cooling down and the sea is refreezing over night, so it is my guess that unless we get a major blizzard that can blow out all the sea ice we are stuck here and will have to be extracted by helicopters.

We have emergency rations for another year but maybe not enough fuel. I'm sure they will get us out with helicopters no problem, but it's any ones guess when I will get home now?

Friday 24th January 2014

This morning I was going to catch up on emails but when I got to my office the deiso’s wanted a new radio for in their work shop, so I headed over to the green store to find a suitable power supply and antenna and as it will be located near people I decided to reduce the output power to one watt. I scratched around for a programming cable but for the life of me I couldn't get it to run on the laptop. I knew it worked on my PC as I used it about nine months ago, but sure enough it wouldn't work on my PC either. I got the shits and looked up the circuit for the microphone pin out on the radio to find TX, RX and GND and quickly made up a new serial cable. And sure enough this one didn't work either.

So next I tried looking up information on the software and found nothing of value. Finally I located a service manual for the radio on line and it listed the programming cable as a two section cable with a DB25 to DB9 adapter and digging around in the bottom cable draw full of shit I found the two cables in question and added a DB25 to DB9 adapter and gave it a try and sure enough it worked. I was still puzzled as to why my cable wouldn't work so I tried to buzz out the cable to see what the difference was and there was no connectivity. This had me totally buggered now so I opened up the DB25 shell and to my surprise discovered a TTL converter on a small PCB. Mystery solved, so I screwed the cables together and wrote all over them so this wouldn't happen again. 

I took the cable back to the Laptop and it wouldn't work so I thought I must have disturbed something so I pulled it all apart again finding a small solder bridge that could have been causing the problem and then reassembled the whole thing again only to discover it still was not working. Bugger me, so I took it all back again to my desk PC and it was working fine, so it turns out the laptop has a faulty serial port......arrrrrr !! 

I reprogrammed the radio in about five minutes and by now half the day was gone. Next task was to reprogram the GPS in the three Hagglunds. I messed around with OziExplorer for ages and for some weird reason it would only display one route at a time. This was not a good day. Eventually I had to use Cookies PC which worked fine and then I had to mess about changing both the Garmin rte and wpt files into a Lawrance usr file. Man, sometimes this stuff can really do your head in but eventually we got there and I took a sim card down to the dieso’s work shop and reprogrammed the three Hag GPS’s in about two minutes each. I also got a few things ready for our trip out to Twintops on Monday before knocking off for Friday’s pizza night.

Thursday 23rd January 2014

This morning I finished off doing my RTA unaccompanied personal effects. All fourteen boxes had to be weighed, measured and tie wrapped and then more consignment stickers affixed and finally they all had to be carted outside and placed into a sea container. What a job. Even though I will now be living out of a backpack for the next two months I was glad to see the last of all that shit.

After catching up on all my emails and stuff, I headed out to the magnetic absolute hut to do this week’s magnetic observations. I was yawning the whole time and after I got back to the office and checked the results before sending them off to Geoscience Australia in Canberra, I had to go up to the red shed for a nanny nap before dinner.

The Snow Petrel is the only member of the genus Pagodroma. It is one of only three birds that breed exclusively in Antarctica and has been seen at the South Pole. It has the most southerly breeding distribution of any bird. These birds look so fragile but are masters of the environment down here and they make a tasty morsel for the Skua's.

Wednesday 22nd January 2014

Today was a big day. I had to have all my unaccompanied personal effects packed, logged, listed, itemised, weighed, labelled and in the green store by days end. I thought I was in pretty good shape as I had been slowly packing up things for quite some time now, but I didn’t allow for being slushy yesterday when I was going to pack up all my radio gear.

First I moved all my gear from the red shed down to the green store and then weighed and labelled it all. Then I got all my gear from the operations building and did the same for it. Once finished I headed off down to the transmitter building to start packing up my gear there. First I lowered and dismantled my 6m antenna which turned out to be difficult job as there was a cool breeze and my hands kept going off touching the cold metal and I had to go inside and put them on the heater to thaw them out several times which was excruciating painful. 

Once done I rolled up the cable and then went inside to pack up my amplifier. First I had to remove the massive 20 kg transformer from inside the amplifier. This was quite strait forward but took time just the same. Once separated they were both packed and labelled. Next job was to remove my HF tuner, 6m amplifier and sequencer and then remove all the redundant cabling leaving just my Flex 5000, laptop and power supply. All this gear was boxed up and labelled and then I had to carry it all outside and put it into the back of the waiting ute. I took all this gear up to the green store and weighed it all and then added more stickers to everything and wrote numbers all over everything. 

Well that was the hard bit out of the way and by now my back was killing me. I went back to the office to create a new consignment on the computer which is quite a tricky procedure. Every time I got to a certain question the computer would freeze. I did this about three times wasting about an hour and a half before coming to the conclusion Google Chrome is not compatible with the econ application and so I switched to Internet Explorer and then it worked, but by now it was past five and John our store man / FTO had gone home, so the rest would have to wait for tomorrow. 

While all this was going on a rare phenomenon for Mawson took place. It snowed most of the day with large fluffy flakes falling straight down and not sideways. It was beautiful and I wish I had more time to watch and enjoy it. It turned everything white including the sea ice and things looked clean and beautiful once again.

And now for something completely different, so far we have bottled about 2500 bottles of homebrew and drank around 1500 bottles.