After staff meeting this morning, we celebrated Jonathan’s 23rd birthday with cake and tea.
Today was a work Wednesday, but, since everyone else had to shop for various supplies to take to the site, I went home to wait for someone to pick me up to go to the site. While waiting, I did some cleaning and waxing on the car that we have so graciously been allowed to use by a missionary couple on deputation. We are also staying in their house.
My work today did not involve directly working on the transmitters, but mostly on correspondence. TWR’s Africa Regional Office received a DX (long distance listener) report from Pennsylvania claiming to have heard a test transmission on 10 June 2013. I was asked to verify the validity of this report. After looking through the logs and reviewing what had been done, this person had heard part of an hour long transmission that we had done on 15,475 kHz while testing TX3 after getting it to tune on higher frequencies. His report was exact including the exact times of a break in the transmission and of its ending. This is quite amazing considering this listener was over 8,000 miles away and to the side of the main beam of the antenna, where the power radiated is less than 3% of what it is on the main beam!
Occasionally, we receive a questionnaire from a supporting church that we need to complete. Often these ask for things like ‘what were your past personal and ministry goals?’, ‘were they reached?’, ‘what are your future goals?’ and other similar questions that can not be completed in a couple of minutes with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ responses. Today, I completed such a questionnaire.
On the way to and from work, several of us engineers have been having an interesting discussion on sunrise and sunsets around the time of the solstices — the longest and shortest days of the year. Did you know that the latest sunrise, nor the earliest sunset, occurs exactly on the winter solstice? We notice this because we are driving to and from work at these times. The winter solstice (in the southern hemisphere) was on June 21, but the earliest sunset actually took place about June 9, while the latest sunrise is not expected until about July 2. We have learned that the same is true for the summer solstice, but not as pronounced. This phenomena is also more pronounced at the equator than higher latitudes. To check out this for where you are (or anyplace) check out http://www.gaisma.com [this site also has an interesting ‘Sun path diagram’] or http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunrise.html
Having noticed this, the discussion has turned to why this is so, which is not so simple to explain. Did you know that a solar day is not always the same length as a clock day? At the solstices, the solar day is about 20 seconds longer than 24 clock hours, and at the equinoxes, the solar day is slightly shorter than 24 clock hours? One of the more understandable scientific explanations that we found was at — http://www.larry.denenberg.com/earliest-sunset.html and one of the more simplified explanations was at —http://earthsky.org/tonight/earliest-sunset-today-but-not-shortest-day. Here are two more interesting explanations talking about the analemma — http://www.sciquill.com/analemma/page2.html — and — http://www.analemma.com
This evening the Bible study at EBC was on Revelation 11. This is the chapter about the two witnesses who were killed and returned to life.
I remembered a humorous thing (to us) that happened on Sunday. There is an intern pastor who leads the opening of the service. At some point he referred a young fellow as a ‘guy’. Later in the service, he apologized for using the word. In this culture, it must be an unapproved slang expression. We did notice that when he apologized there was a suppressed congregational chuckle, which seemed to indicate that it is probably more accepted now than in the past.
On Monday night, when our guests left our house after supper, we noticed that the alarm did not give the usual ‘squawk’ as they walked across the yard. Tuesday evening, I checked the motion sensors and noted that they were working. Tonight, Steve brought some fruit over that his wife bought and was splitting a box with us. I asked Steve to help figure out what was happening. We found out that there was a blown fuse in the Auto Bleep — that part of the system that automatically sets the various levels of alarms and calls cell phones, if there is a problem. The basic alarm system was still working, if set manually, which we do every evening, or when away from the house. The fuse was replaced, but Klaus had to come with his laptop, plug into the Auto Bleep and set it to the correct time. Now everything is working normally again.