Pineapple fields at Malkerns about 12 miles west of Manzini.  It has been unusually cloudy for the past few days with highs around 65F.  The nights are cooler.

Forgot to mention yesterday that Virginia went out to tea (“elevenses”) with Lorraine.  [Lunch is usually at 1pm]  They originally planned to go to Guava Gallery, but found out that it is closed on Mondays.  Instead they went to Sambane Tea Garden next to Swazi Candles, where Virginia said she had the largest scone that she had ever seen.  It had jam and whipped cream on it.  On the way home, they passed the pineapple fields at Malkerns.

There were 14 present for site devotions this morning.  I challenged the group with I Corinthians 9:24-27 to “finish strong” in our Christian ‘race’, or join in the race.

Now that some of the anomalies with the transmitter have been traced to the automation interface cards in the transmitter, all the remaining cards were modified to correct the problems.

Small pineapples can be seen in the lower left field. It takes about 2 years for a plant to grow fruit and about 6 months for the fruit to mature.

Klaus and Graham began working on the automation program to clean up a few problems that were discovered.  Since this was not my area of expertise, I decided to again inspect Antenna 6.  It continues to arc (but less frequently) after our previous modifications.  I also decided to check out the other three antenna similar to Antenna 6, and the rest of the shortwave antennas.  Some observations and thoughts:

1.  The corona rings on Antenna 11 (the one built in 1985) have more ‘wrap-around’ curvature on the outside ring than the newer ones.

2.  The fourth element from the bottom on the east side of Antenna 6 looks about 4″ short.  Wonder if this could be a source of unbalance in the antenna?  Maybe it should be measured.

3.  To determine where the arcing starts from, I wonder if it might be possible to set up a movie camera during the problem 35 minute tranmission and capture an occurrence of the arc.  Replaying frame-by-frame just might give us a clue as to where additional corona treatment might be helpful, rather than using out current trial methods.

4.  Another option might be to have someone with the right computer program to more accurately model the element ends and corona rings to determine where the greatest voltage stress occurs.

This trek around the shortwave antenna field took about an hour.

At lunch I set out a carton of Virginia’s homemade chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.  Each person at the site was able to have two.  Virginia got lots of compliments!  I think they want more!!

After lunch we began testing the automation changes.  Very few of the commands to control the transmitters worked properly!  When the afternoon broadcasts began, I grabbed a list of the timetable of computer commands and manually operated the transmitters as Klaus and Graham continued to tackle the automation system problem.

The first thing they did was to replace the program that they had modified with the previous one.  It still did not work.  I was beginning to think it might be a long night manually doing everything that the computer normally does!  I’ve heard of “replacing a person with a computer”, but this would be ‘replacing a computer with a person’.

Eventually, it was found that the problem was a bad connection of one of the control wires between the automation system and the transmitters.  This was repaired.  Rather than waiting for 30 minutes (until the next set of automated commands) to verify that the problem had been solved, the system clock was adjusted to the time just before the previously observed problem, then we watched to see that it was now working properly.  It functioned properly, and we were able to head for home only one hour late.

We rejoiced in the fact that the problems had been solved with no lost airtime.  A listener would not have known there was anything abnormal happening.