Today Chuck Sauders arrived from Johannesburg to install the ducting for the heat exchanger.  This involves knocking a hole through the wall behind the transmitter and installing a louvre.  As a result of the covering of the transmitter to keep out dust and the work on the transmission line, work on the transmitter is quite restricted.  The rest of the connections to the SSM modules have been tightened.  Also the tiny 6-32 screws for the trim around the control panel were finally found, so was able to install those pieces of trim. 

The engineering staff here is wanting to use air conditioned and filtered air for the inside of the transmitter cabinets.  To do this they want to use outside air only for cooling the ‘radiators’.  They want to recirculate all the other air.  This is relatively straight forward except for the air that passes over the SSM modules.  They are hoping to accomplish this by rotating the associated blower 90 degrees so that the air is exhausted into the room.  This will require some additional baffling in the intake plenum.  It will also require doubling the  air flow of the second heat exchanger blower and changing the baffling into the heat exchangers.  Part of this morning I spent researching blower and motor combinations that might work for this application.

Something special happened today.  We were able to visit two of the farmers neighboring the TWR site that I had known for many years.  Steve and I were invited to lunch with Harry Lourens.  His wife Molly managed to get off from her job with Dr. Hynd to be there, too.  Harry manages a farm for the Howe family.  In addition to cattle, they raise potatoes and they were in the process of ‘lifting’ them while we visited.  Tons of potatoes are bagged each day during harvest.  They are high quality and many are purchased by Simba chips in South Africa.  Another enterprise that they have undertaken is production of charcoal.  Harry took us on a tour of their latest project of raising chickens.  They have five large building with 20,000 chickens in each building.  They start with day old chicks and they are ready for processing in 36 days.  No hormones are used but growth is faster because lighting is used for 22 hours per day to encourage eating.  They are meticulous in disinfecting the buildings before starting more chicks and we disinfected the boots we were required to use anytime we entered or left a building.