We had staff meeting at the TWR Manzini office this morning.  Steve Stavropoulos shared about his August trip to the U.S.  I shared about my involvement at the technology center and progress on the HC100-9 installation.

After staff meeting, Virginia and I were given a tour of the Voice of the Church (VOC) facilities on the ground floor of the TWR building.  It was amazing to watch the ‘DJ’ doing a professional job of live programing.  At the same time we saw the FM200T (one of the first from HCJB in Elkhart) with lights flashing and sitting on a prominent location behind the receptionist.  We wondered at the fact that this transmitter is the first relay in a long string of transmitters relaying programs in Siswati and English throughout Swaziland.

As a result of the various thing happening this morning, we only arrived at the transmitting site after noon.

One of the log periodic antennas with a frequency range extending down to the 90 meterband was now available to continue testing of HC100-9 down to 3200 kHz.  We started at the lowest frequency that we tested on yesterday and continued right down the bands to 3200 kHz.  In every case the transmitter came right up to full power without any adjustments required. Some adjustments, major or minor, have alwasy been required on the three previous HC100s that I have installed.  While testing at 3200 kHz (the very lowest frequency), the highest frequency channel was selected and the tune button pressed.  The transmitter came right up to power. All this has been amazing to me and especially to the TWR Swaziland staff, who have operated the other two HC100s at this location.

We hope to put the transmitter into the broadcast schedule tomorrow, as soon as the audio and remote control lines are installed from the control room.

We have experienced answers to the prayers of many, and are rejoicing in the Lord!

After correcting a couple of water leaks and several wiring errors from the transmitter reassembly, the transmitter was first switched on at about 12:15 (6:15am EDT) today.  It came right up on 9600, 9800 kHz, and the two 11 MHz frequencies and operated at 100KW.  It was at this point we realized the driver plate was not autotuning and that the driver plate current metering circuit was not functioning.  Currently we are trying to sort out these problems and suspect some more wiring errors.

ABOUT 3 HOURS LATER

We found the wiring error for the driver plate current metering.  One of the wires was not labeled correctly and when we connected it according to the schematic the driver plate current gave correct readings.  In addition the driver plate autotuning started working and we were able to autotune on all the frequencies from 9600 kHz through 17 MHz.  The presets done in Elkhart were ‘spot on’ and immediately tuned up.  The staff here were quite impressed, especially to see it tune the 17 MHz frequency without incident, even at 100kw.

We were not been able to tune frequencies below 9 MHz due to not being able to access antennas for frequencies as low as 3200 kHz.  Hopefully that can be done tomorrow.  We still need an audio line to test with audio, but everything looks promising.

There is still one more metering problem to sort out.  The driver screen current metering does not seem to be working properly.

Today we had planned to go the the site to help Chuck Saunders finish the air ducting for the transmitter.  When Steve called this morning he found out the Mark Blosser was planning to help instead.  This gave us a good excuse to take the day off and we went to Hlane Game Reserve and relaxed.  We relaxed so much that each of us ended up taking short naps sitting in the soft chairs under the thatched roof overlooking the water hole.  While we were awake, we saw lots of rhinos and elephants.  Since Virginia was along and she will be writing so, I will let her tell you about it.

The first part of today was weekly staff meeting (usually on Wednesday but moved to Friday to accommodate the Cox’s report mentioned in Virginia’s blog entry).   We were greatly encouraged by three listener letter excerpts from the Women of Hope program.  Hope to get copies of these to share at a later time.

After staff meeting, Steve and I went shopping for electrical supplies for a work team that is coming the end of next week.  As usual, the shop was out of stock on some common parts, so another trip will be necessary next week We finally arrived at the transmitting site about 1:00pm.

Chuck Saunders continued doing ductwork for the intake and exhaust air for cooling the transmitter.  He plans to work tomorrow to finish it up.  For some reason he wants to get back to his wife in Johannesburg.

Today we did some of the few things that could be done while the duct work was progressing.  I connected the remaining water lines now that the transmission line is completed.  I also had to reroute a wire that got ‘trapped’ on the wrong side of the VHF filter — what appeared to be an easy task ended up taking about an hour!  Steve connected all the fiber optics to the SSM modules and then we checked out the PA bias regulator to make sure that it survived shipping in place.  We still have to check out the harmonic damper, but that will have to wait until the ducting is done so that we can get the back PA door open.  We also filled the transmitter water system in preparation for testing, which we hope will begin on Monday.

Today Chuck Sauders arrived from Johannesburg to install the ducting for the heat exchanger.  This involves knocking a hole through the wall behind the transmitter and installing a louvre.  As a result of the covering of the transmitter to keep out dust and the work on the transmission line, work on the transmitter is quite restricted.  The rest of the connections to the SSM modules have been tightened.  Also the tiny 6-32 screws for the trim around the control panel were finally found, so was able to install those pieces of trim. 

The engineering staff here is wanting to use air conditioned and filtered air for the inside of the transmitter cabinets.  To do this they want to use outside air only for cooling the ‘radiators’.  They want to recirculate all the other air.  This is relatively straight forward except for the air that passes over the SSM modules.  They are hoping to accomplish this by rotating the associated blower 90 degrees so that the air is exhausted into the room.  This will require some additional baffling in the intake plenum.  It will also require doubling the  air flow of the second heat exchanger blower and changing the baffling into the heat exchangers.  Part of this morning I spent researching blower and motor combinations that might work for this application.

Something special happened today.  We were able to visit two of the farmers neighboring the TWR site that I had known for many years.  Steve and I were invited to lunch with Harry Lourens.  His wife Molly managed to get off from her job with Dr. Hynd to be there, too.  Harry manages a farm for the Howe family.  In addition to cattle, they raise potatoes and they were in the process of ‘lifting’ them while we visited.  Tons of potatoes are bagged each day during harvest.  They are high quality and many are purchased by Simba chips in South Africa.  Another enterprise that they have undertaken is production of charcoal.  Harry took us on a tour of their latest project of raising chickens.  They have five large building with 20,000 chickens in each building.  They start with day old chicks and they are ready for processing in 36 days.  No hormones are used but growth is faster because lighting is used for 22 hours per day to encourage eating.  They are meticulous in disinfecting the buildings before starting more chicks and we disinfected the boots we were required to use anytime we entered or left a building.