I was at the transmitter site again this morning about 6:30 to see how well the transmitter operated overnight. There were no cutbacks and no other faults on the log. Even though the audio input had only been reduced by 0.5dBu yesterday, this slight reduction seems to have solved the problems we were having. I decided to gradually increase the audio levels over the next few days (today by 0.2dBu) to determine maximum performance with minimum faults. We’ll see tomorrow what effect this has.

I came back home, showered and ate breakfast (my normal Corn Flakes — $3.70 for 12 oz box), then Virginia and I went to the office. Virginia worked as receptionist and I wrote some reports. Also checked on the Swaziland shipment. One document needed to be done yet this morning to avoid delaying the shipment and it looks like it was submitted in time.

After lunch I headed to the transmitter site. I found Benny and Lionel in the building looking at the remains of a tower light fixture. Lionel had climbed Antenna 4 to replace some burnt out light bulbs and found not only that the top light was bad, but that the red glass cover was shattered. Lionel found some obvious burn marks on one of the tower legs close to the light, so we assume lightning had struck the tower and caused the damage (in spite of there being a lightning rod to prevent such damage!). He took a picture of it with his cell phone and I hope to get a copy of it tomorrow to put in this blog entry. Since there are no spare red glass covers, they are planning to take one from the lower level and put it on the top. When a replacement arrives they won’t have to climb as high to replace it.

Now that the water has dried up enough to get to the towers without walking in deep mud, I did an inspection tour of the antenna arc gaps and the antenna tuning units (ATUs) at the the base of each of four towers. I found a few things that seemed abnormal:
–There had been recent arcing on the Antenna 4 gap (could it be related to the above paragraph?)
–The arc gap on Antenna 3 seemed about twice as wide as the others when it should be only about 40% wider. We’ll have to verify and correct this, if necessary.
–Inside the ATUs, some relays to control the RF switches were loose in their sockets, in spite of having special retainers to hold them in. I found some loose screws on the retainers and tightened them.
I didn’t realize how hot it was inside the ATUs until I stepped outside and felt the ‘cool’ 90F breezes!

Next an inspection was done of the phasor inside the building. Everything in it looked fine. The output of the transmitter goes into the phasor which distributes the right amount of power and the right phase to each tower via that tower’s ATU. In the case of this antenna system, there are switches in the phasor and each tuning unit to allow three different patterns of radiation — north, south and non-directional. These switches can make changes in less than one second.

Next I did some more work on the modulation module repair and hit a snag when the manual stated to replace the insulating material under the power transistors. There is new material on hand, so I removed the old. The manual said to use solvent to remove any remaining residue of the old one. Unfortunately, there was a thick residue and all I could find to try to clean it was rubbing alcohol. Worked on this for about 30 minutes, but residue still remained. Will try to find a source of a better solvent before returning tomorrow.

We attempted to go for our evening swim, but found a large group of people in formal attire with fancy cameras taking pictures. We decided they must be taking wedding photos or there was some other kind of news-making event taking place. In either case, we figured we shouldn’t be around and came back home.

Virginia made a nice supper of chicken and rice with curry and gravy. She also found some frozen green beans to go along with it. Of course, there was iced tea to drink. We drink lots of ice tea!

After supper, Virginia decided to make some apple-strudel muffins for tomorrow. She had the batch made and put into paper baking cups in a muffin pan to put in the oven. Even though the oven pilot light was working, the oven would not come on. Fortunately there is a toaster oven in the kitchen (maybe that’s why its there!). Since the muffin pan was too big to fit, she set the paper baking cups in the pan for the toaster oven. The results are still very yummy, but the muffins were square on top and slightly flatter than normal muffins. Virginia took a photo of them, so it might appear in her blog entry or maybe here.