This morning Steve had several errands to do in town, so I accompanied him to several firms to follow up on orders.  We went by the bank and I noticed that times have not changed much.  The lines were in excess of 20 persons in length and did not seem to be moving very quickly.  While still in town Steve received a message from his son Duane that his car had been stolen this morning in Durban.  Steve now had some additional paperwork to locate, copy and send for the police report and a call to make to his auto insurance company. 

We finally got to the transmitter site about noon where Hans was still busy programming the PLC.  While waiting for him, I took a number of photos and loaded them onto my memory stick for later use. 

The PLC programming was tediously reviewed and ready just in time to commence broadcasting about 4:15 pm.  A thunderstorm rolled in within a few minutes.  Fortunately areas west received much needed rain.  Unfortunately the site received almost none and the lightning wreaked havoc with the transmissions.  Each lightning flash triggered the THF arc detector until I noticed the external side doors to the transmitter and building were open.  Then as the storm passed the power would fail for a couple of seconds with each lightning strike, the standby engine would start and before the standby power could switch on, the power company would come back on line.  All three transmitters would then need to be restarted quickly.  This sequence of events repeated about five times in ten minutes until the power totally went off and the standby power got a chance to switch on.  The power company was off for the rest of the evening, but the engine kept on running nicely and the new transmitter performed well.  It ran at 50 kw the first night because we still did not have the pulleys to bring the cooling fans up to full speed.