Virginia and Ethelyn Schultz went with the ladies for the morning at Kanuku Rooi Lamoenchi, a historic plantation house.

I took Bob Schultz, 95 year old TWR engineer, with me to the transmitter site for the morning. After morning devotions, we had a joint meeting with Wendell from Nautel and Tom King from Kintronic to discuss the reason for occasional momentary shutbacks of the transmitter. We have come to the conclusion that most are caused by arc detectors in the antenna tuning huts, especially antennas 1 and 3.

Tom King and I watched inside these tuning huts from behind a safetly barrier while the transmitter was operating and discovered several places where there was arcing from points (that were supposedly grounded) to copper straps connected to station ground. The safety barrier, sits on on top of two of these 4″ wide copper straps, and two wider copper straps next to the wall–all going to station ground, The ends of the safety barrier are ‘grounded’ at two points on each wall. With all this grounding, there is still occasional arcing occurring between the safety barrier and one of the 4″ copper straps.

There was also arcing at the ‘grounded’ end of an 18′ long insulator to ground. We swapped this insulator out for a new one to see if the original one might have been faulty.

While Tom King and I took some measurements in the phasor, Daryl made ground straps to tie the barrier fence directly to the 4″ straps to see if this eliminates that arcing. At Tom’s suggestion Daryl and Jonas hipotted (tested using a high voltage tester) several of the capacitors. Some of these are rated at 55,000 volts. They did find one capacitor (that is supposed to be good for 35,000 volts) that would arc over at 20,000 volts. This could be a problem. The men at Tom’s company are looking into possible temporary solutions for us to make tomorrow.

Jonas using a hipot to test on of the capacitors.

TWR had a BBQ on the beach near the airport starting at 5pm. Our measurements in the phasor were not completed until about 5:15pm. We quickly checked to make sure the transmitter was ready to operate at full power on all three antenna patterns before leaving the transmitter site for the BBQ. Although we didn’t arrive at the beach until 5:30pm, the food was not being served yet.  Hamburgers and chicken kebabs were grilled.  Salads were brought by various staff, including Virginia.  Virginia also made her special baked bean recipe–must have been well liked because there were no leftovers to bring home!

TWR staff and visitors at Te Amo Beach, near the airport, for an evening BBQ.

I had a good time chatting with Joe and Jenny Emert from a Christian station near Atlanta.  Joe worked with Sam Rowley of the HCJB Engineering Center (now SonSet Solutions) to set up the FM network in Papua New Guinea.  They also know Alan and Sarah Good from SonSet Solutions.

Te Amo Beach Sunset with Tanker delivering fuel to airport in background.

There was a beautiful view of the sunset at the beach, but it gets dark quickly afterwards. By the time everything was packed up and we drove home, it was almost 8 pm.