Here are a few photos from the Evagelical Bible Church Ladies’ Meeting and High Tea on Saturday–most from the EBC Facebook page:

I am combining four days into one blog as the bulk of my time was working on the drawings for the medium-wave AM transmission line (feedline, for short). I am FINALLY discovering more of the shortcuts in LibreCAD! More than a dozen program crashes have occurred, which seem to be caused by an overflow of the registries (the program saves all commands and other entries so one can ‘undo’ or ‘redo’ steps and when there are too many saved it appears that a crash occurs). Frequent saving of one’s work and rebooting saves a lot of headache. Also found when the program refuses to execute a command, your work can be saved, the program rebooted and the command usually works then. I suspect this problem is also related to overfull registries.

I tried to make PDFs of these drawings to email to other TWR engineers, but kept coming up with blank PDFs. A quick internet search revealed several solutions. One issue is that LibreCAD’s default for line width is ‘zero’. The lines show up on the computer as they are drawn, but not in the PDF or printout, so a greater line width has to be assigned. Now we know!

Monday 15 August 2022

In addition to LibreCAD crashes, a few times, when I wanted to do an internet search, a ‘pop-up’ screen in all German covered the whole screen wanting me to press one of two buttons in German. Finally figured out closing the tab each time it appears takes care of the problem for a while. All other web pages and ‘pop-ups’ are always in English.

This evening has turned cool, so we used the fireplace for the first time in a couple of weeks.

Tuesday 16 August 2022

This morning it was very cool and even cooler at the site – 42F.

After devotions. Salema pointed to a line item on their inventory list that had come in the HC100 parts shipment and wanted me to identify what it was. From the description, I had no clue, so asked Selma to physically show me the part. When he did, I immediately knew where it belonged in the transmitter, but could not recall the HC100 part number nor its exact description. I spent the next hour or so combing through drawings, bill-of-materials lists to locate the exact description and HC100 part number. TWR Eswatini consecutively assigns their own inventory number to each part that comes in. In this case, there was a mix-up with the description. It would be helpful, if the HC100 part number was also included somewhere in the description. [The HC100 part number was attached to each item we sent in the HC100 parts shipment]

Today Virginia saw in the sunshine reflecting on the floor a shadow of a tail (hoping it was not a snake!). When she looked to see what it was she decided to take a picture of the animal.

Wednesday 17 August 2022

Tobi stayed in town today, so I worked on drawings at ‘home’.

We were informed of a bring-your-own-meat braai (southern Africa BBQ) for this Saturday, so Virginia needed to go pick up some food items. We went to the new SuperSpar (my first time there). It is a huge supermarket and very busy, even during the off-hours that we were there. The parking was full and the street that it is on has lots of traffic. On the way home, we stopped by Sunnyside Butchery to pick up some meat. It reminds me of the butcheries from 60 years ago.

Thursday 18 August
This morning it was the warmest yet – 70F when I went out the door. It was a bit cooler at the site – 61F.

Tobi wanted me to look at some guy wires on Ant 3 that occasionally touch together in strong winds. He wanted to know why they were so close together, so I showed him my original drawing of Ant 11 from 1984. [Ant 3 was built in the mid-1990s based on Ant 11plans] The problem guys were not attached at the top of the tower according to the plans. Also noted that the guy wire diameters were not the same. I suggested a possible change at the anchor point for a temporary solution until the top attachments can be revised at a time when other work was needed at the top of the tower.

Today all the feedline parts drawings were cleaned up, title boxes added and PDFs created for sending to TWR engineers in South Africa, Asia and the U.S.