Before work, I decided to again review our McGuiReport that was sent last night, now without the ‘bleary eyes’ of the night before.  This is when I discovered one period, which should have been a comma, plus a quote mark that somehow appeared where it should never have been.   Corrections were quickly make and request made to replace last night’s file.  Hopefully, the lesson has been learned–not to send a highly edited document at bedtime, but wait til morning for that last proofread!  Yeah–like making blog entries, like this one, in late evening!!

My first project this morning was to complete the wiring of the surge suppressor mentioned in yesterday’s blog.

The step-down transformer for the control rack is the gray ‘box’ below the UPS

My next project was to install a step-down transformer to reduce the voltage from 127 volts to 102 volts in the transmitter control rack.  This became necessary because the antenna monitor, which displays the parameters (ratio and phasing) of the four towers in the directional antenna system, kept blowing fuses.  I mentioned the possibility that it may have a 115 volt transformer in its power supply that might be rated for 60 Hz (the US standard) and not for 50 Hz (used here) operation.  Since the control rack runs off the UPS (uninterruptible power supply, it was decided to install the step-down transformer on the wood panel below the UPS, where there is more space than in the control rack.

Antenna monitor is the gray instrument located just below the blue panel of antenna switching controls.

I then assisted Tom and Joshua with fine tuning of the antenna/phasor system.  By two-way radio, I was asked to turn on, or off, the 100,000-watt transmitter then read off the antenna monitor readings from the control rack located by the new transmitter.  Initially, I tried to use the two-way radio to directly read off the parameters of each of the four towers back to Tom, while he remained at one of the towers making adjustments.  For some reason the readings were varying all over the place.  It was then that I every time I activated two-way radio reading would begin to vary.  From then on, I wrote down all the readings,  before reading them off to Tom via the two-way radio.

While I was doing this, Daryl, Jonas, and Marco (who were in phone contact with Nautel, the new transmitter manufacturer), switched on power to the new transmitter to energize its computer.  This revealed that the input voltage was a little too high.  Therefore the transmitter was shut down and the taps on the transformer were set for correct voltages. We did not try sending power to the antennas today (maybe tomorrow).  We left the transmitter site, around 7 pm.

Jonas, Larry and Dave in front of the new transmitter with its touch screen monitor control system powered up (above ‘NX400’).

This evening was spent trying to catch up on blogs entries that had been set aside to prepare and submit our Feb 2018 McGuiReport.  I managed to do four blog entries, before becoming too ‘bleary-eyed’ around 11:30 pm to continue!