This morning, the temperature was 48F outside and 63F inside.  It only warmed up to 65F inside our house by the end of the day.

I checked the transmitter logs first thing this morning to assess whether there had been any improvement from the installation of the corona rings on Antenna 6 last Tuesday.  Unfortunately, there were some arcs, but the number had been reduced by only 40%.  Will continue looking for a 100% reduction.

Klaus mentioned that he was going to visit the manager of Dinedor Ranch, which is adjacent to the transmitting site, and asked if I would like to go along.  As one of my desires has been to visit some of the ranchers that we have known since the station was started in Swaziland, I did go.  We had a good time chatting with John and his wife, Ann.  They served us tea and coffee and rusks (a hard, dry biscuit — http://www.food.com/recipe/south-african-rusks-11415 ) for morning tea.   The rusk is dunked in tea or coffee to make it soft.

Near the end of the morning broadcasts, one of the transmitters went off with an ‘auxiliary fault’.  As we were trying to figure out what was happening, the other two transmitters also went off.  It was determined the fault was with the PLC (programmable logic controller) that automatically controls the transmitters.  Since the transmitters were not the problem, we bypassed the automatic control and manually switched all the transmitters back on.  The PLC runs off of large batteries kept charged by a battery charger.  The battery voltage was extremely low and it was discovered that the circuitry used to charge the battery had failed.  The fault was rectified in short order.

In the afternoon, I returned to trying to tune TX3 on higher frequencies.  If you look back at my blog from last Monday (2013/06/10), we had aborted the attempt to install two 18″ cables.  Today, I verified these cables were not faulty, then tried again.  This time the transmitter came up and the tuning was nearly perfect with much better efficiency.  It was now possible to tune the transmitter up on all frequencies up to 16 MHz.  It could also be tuned up on 17.8 MHz, but only on low power.  It will most likely work on high power, but it was not possible to get enough RF drive from the low power stages.  This is another challenge that deserves some attention.  For some time, the transmitter was limited to frequencies under 10 MHz.  Now there are several more shortwave bands available for use on TX3.

This evening, I was able to post the last three days of blogs.  For once, our blog is current!  Hopefully we can keep it that way.