VIRGINIA

Not a very eventful day.  I sat in the office and worked on some cards.  Joe has some pictures he wants us to go through, but not sure I know many of the people. Will have Larry help me with that off and on.  He will probably know more that I do.

In our prayer time this morning we were encouraged by how the Lord is working in this area of the world.  Churches begun because of the broadcasts of TWR.  People hearing who have never heard. ‘Pastors’ who were saved through the broadcasts using the correspondence with the pastor on the radio, as well as literature that is included to form a library for the new converts.  Their only method of learning besides the radio.

After Larry picked me up, we ate a light supper and went for our usual swim and watched the sun plop into the ocean.  Tomorrow it will pop out of the ocean on the other side of the island. 🙂

LARRY
After devotions this morning and rather than making two trips to the transmitter site, I spent the morning at the office/studio answering emails and studying the manual for the Nautel 100,000-watt transmitter.  I was planning on checking out the spare PA module that was suspected to have a problem and wanted to be more familiar with its operation before tackling any repair.

We came back to the guest house for a dinner of leftover curried chicken, rice, and bananas. I then took Virginia back to the office and went to the transmitter site.  First I wanted to verify that the suspect module was actually faulty.  This was done by removing one good module and noting that the power dropped about 7kw.  I then installed the suspect module and noted the power only dropped about 4kw when it was removed.  This definitely confirmed there was a problem.

While the transmitter was already turned on it was switched to the nondirectional pattern (it also has a north pattern to the Carribean or south pattern to South America) and it was noted the output power showed 105kw.  Last night the log showed that the transmitter had cut back power to 80kw for much of the early morning because the power had reached the max limit of 107kw.  Therefore we decided to reduce the 105kw to 103kw to see if we could avoid the cut back of power.

After returning the transmitter to remote operation so it could be controlled by the automation, I opened the PA module up.  I quickly observed that one of the four main 20 amp fuses was different than the other three.  An ohmmeter test showed that it was blown and none of the others were.  I looked for a spare fuse and found none.  Checked at Newark Electronics (~$24 each) and DigiKey (~$21 each), then decided to check Alan Sales [www.alan-sales.com] and found that they had six in stock at $6.90 each.  An order will likely be placed tomorrow.  Because the fuse was blown and it was different than the rest, I am guessing that this is at least the second time this fuse has blown and that I had better check further to see it there is a faulty device(s) that might be the cause. Something to do tomorrow.

Came back to the office at 4:30 to pick up Virginia.  I shared with Joe Barker my observations and we discussed the things required for me to take over sole monitoring of the transmitter while it is broadcasting from 5:30pm to 8:30am.  I had been given a cell phone that will ring, if there is a problem, and now I have a list of codes to help determine what is wrong and other codes to try to correct the problem remotely via the cell phone.  Joe wants to lend me a laptop that will show what is happening at a glance and allow corrective action by pushing a button on the computer screen.  The laptop can also show a log of the sequence of events which the phone can not do.

We came ‘home’ for a light dinner then went for our evening swim.