Happy Birthday Opa!

We love you 🙂

Aren’t you glad that you can trust your family with the house keys? (And be administrator to your blog?)

To bad we could not find a baby picture too 🙁

I was at the transmitter site again this morning about 6:30 to see how well the transmitter operated overnight. There were no cutbacks and no other faults on the log. Even though the audio input had only been reduced by 0.5dBu yesterday, this slight reduction seems to have solved the problems we were having. I decided to gradually increase the audio levels over the next few days (today by 0.2dBu) to determine maximum performance with minimum faults. We’ll see tomorrow what effect this has.

I came back home, showered and ate breakfast (my normal Corn Flakes — $3.70 for 12 oz box), then Virginia and I went to the office. Virginia worked as receptionist and I wrote some reports. Also checked on the Swaziland shipment. One document needed to be done yet this morning to avoid delaying the shipment and it looks like it was submitted in time.

After lunch I headed to the transmitter site. I found Benny and Lionel in the building looking at the remains of a tower light fixture. Lionel had climbed Antenna 4 to replace some burnt out light bulbs and found not only that the top light was bad, but that the red glass cover was shattered. Lionel found some obvious burn marks on one of the tower legs close to the light, so we assume lightning had struck the tower and caused the damage (in spite of there being a lightning rod to prevent such damage!). He took a picture of it with his cell phone and I hope to get a copy of it tomorrow to put in this blog entry. Since there are no spare red glass covers, they are planning to take one from the lower level and put it on the top. When a replacement arrives they won’t have to climb as high to replace it.

Now that the water has dried up enough to get to the towers without walking in deep mud, I did an inspection tour of the antenna arc gaps and the antenna tuning units (ATUs) at the the base of each of four towers. I found a few things that seemed abnormal:
–There had been recent arcing on the Antenna 4 gap (could it be related to the above paragraph?)
–The arc gap on Antenna 3 seemed about twice as wide as the others when it should be only about 40% wider. We’ll have to verify and correct this, if necessary.
–Inside the ATUs, some relays to control the RF switches were loose in their sockets, in spite of having special retainers to hold them in. I found some loose screws on the retainers and tightened them.
I didn’t realize how hot it was inside the ATUs until I stepped outside and felt the ‘cool’ 90F breezes!

Next an inspection was done of the phasor inside the building. Everything in it looked fine. The output of the transmitter goes into the phasor which distributes the right amount of power and the right phase to each tower via that tower’s ATU. In the case of this antenna system, there are switches in the phasor and each tuning unit to allow three different patterns of radiation — north, south and non-directional. These switches can make changes in less than one second.

Next I did some more work on the modulation module repair and hit a snag when the manual stated to replace the insulating material under the power transistors. There is new material on hand, so I removed the old. The manual said to use solvent to remove any remaining residue of the old one. Unfortunately, there was a thick residue and all I could find to try to clean it was rubbing alcohol. Worked on this for about 30 minutes, but residue still remained. Will try to find a source of a better solvent before returning tomorrow.

We attempted to go for our evening swim, but found a large group of people in formal attire with fancy cameras taking pictures. We decided they must be taking wedding photos or there was some other kind of news-making event taking place. In either case, we figured we shouldn’t be around and came back home.

Virginia made a nice supper of chicken and rice with curry and gravy. She also found some frozen green beans to go along with it. Of course, there was iced tea to drink. We drink lots of ice tea!

After supper, Virginia decided to make some apple-strudel muffins for tomorrow. She had the batch made and put into paper baking cups in a muffin pan to put in the oven. Even though the oven pilot light was working, the oven would not come on. Fortunately there is a toaster oven in the kitchen (maybe that’s why its there!). Since the muffin pan was too big to fit, she set the paper baking cups in the pan for the toaster oven. The results are still very yummy, but the muffins were square on top and slightly flatter than normal muffins. Virginia took a photo of them, so it might appear in her blog entry or maybe here.

It’s a good thing we went to sleep early last night. This morning I headed to the site about 6am to observe the transmitter operating at full power with programming and under normal operating conditions. I’m glad that I did. Multiple ‘shutbacks’ were observed where the transmitter shuts down for 0.2 seconds to clear a possible arc, or other fault in the system. I also observed that the audio level was extremely high and recorded more than sixty flashes of the 100% negative modulation light in a period of one minute. I would consider this as fairly extreme over-modulation. After breakfast and devotions at the office, this information was conveyed to Joe Barker and we did a test from the office.

The transmitter and audio levels at the site can be remotely controlled via the internet, so we turned on the transmitter with the same antenna, same level of audio and even the same program that caused the most problems two days before. The only difference was the time of day. During this short test we heard multiple ‘glitches’ within a few seconds, which were to us indications of ‘shutbacks’. We then reduced the audio level by 0.5db and heard no ‘shutbacks’. As mentioned in a previous blog entry, a 1db change in level is barely perceptible, so this is half of perceptible! We decided to leave things at this level and see how the transmitter reacts. This means I will likely head to the transmitter site again in the morning at about 6am. Short night tonight.

Today the truck arrived in Elkhart at about 1pm to collect the 50,000-watt AM transmitter for Swaziland. The crew there quickly went to work and got it all packed and secured in just over two hours. Please pray that it will travel safely and on time to the port. Pray also that a couple more pieces of paperwork that must be submitted tomorrow morning can be processed quickly.

Virginia felt much better today and we resumed our evening swims. The sunset was amazing once again, The haze level was low and, with no clouds where the sun was setting, it liked like an incredibly really bright orange ball. Unfortunately we didn’t bring our camera this time! Also, saw at least three crabs scurrying around our feet before we got into the water.

Virginia got to bed at a reasonable hour tonight, but I finished putting photos on two of her blog entries, talked to Allan on Skype for almost 20 minutes, then worked on my blog entry for today. Now it is well past time to say good night!

Today I have been a bit lazy, trying to fight off this cold. I am feeling better, so will probably be up to the evening swim tonight. A good thing about an evening swim, is that we don’t become sunburned and it is cool and relaxing after a hot day. The water is so clear we can easily see our feet even at 5ft. and the sun down! It is beautiful.

After lunch, I took Larry to the office and then did some grocery shopping. I took some pictures inside the store for those of you who are interested. They do carry some American foods for the Americans who are not brave enough to look at the pictures and try something that they may or may not

recognize. They are also more convenient so the kitchen doesn’t heat up quite so much. So far I have not given in and paid the extra money for the convenience.

This morning we discovered that the ants had found our sugar. They were on the outside of the container after a little sugar which was

there. I changed containers and then washed down the kitchen and sprayed around the windows. Will have to be a little more careful. I am so thankful that we have not seen cockroaches. They grow pretty big here and I really do not want to find one, even if my grandsons would love to see it.

We did discover that there is a snake on Bonaire. It grows to a length of 4 inches, and is only seen at dusk when it comes out to feed. It looks like a skinny worm. I have never seen one of these. I think the cockroaches might be bigger

than the snake… well maybe not quite that long, but much wider. I’d rather see the snake!

NOTE — To see a bigger (and in some cases, expanded) version of any of the images in this blog, just click on the one you want to see.

Maybe I spoke too soon! This past overnight the transmitter had two cutbacks in power to 75kw from 100kw for relative short periods of time, plus a ‘modulator protect’ alarm. After reviewing this information (plus my observation that the transmitter appeared to be over-modulating) with Joe Barker, the audio input was reduced by 0.1db. For comparison purposes, 1.0db is a barely perceptible drop in level. I also reviewed the transmitter manuals about what causes cutbacks and then tried to find, without success, the parameters that allowed its return to full power. We knew that it did, but why, in some cases, did it recover to full power within a few seconds and in other case it took a few hour?. Since this was not in the manual. I finally ended up calling Nautel, the manufacturer, who emailed this information to us. I thought about putting the information in this blog, but there are 6 different levels of cutback and 6 different recovery times. With this new information, we can now proceed with a clearer perception of what is actually happening.

I spent the afternoon at the transmitter site continuing to troubleshoot the faulty modulation module in the PA module. The manual stated to remove resistor R4 and test six different diodes. When I did this all the diodes appeared bad, so I removed them one at a time, finding each one removed was good but the remaining ones were bad. After all were removed and tested good, it appeared the manual had a misprint and that a different resistor should have been removed to do the diode test! So now I had to reinstall all the good diodes. Next step will be to reinstall the three good power transistors and replace the one bad one.

About 4:40pm, I headed to the office to pick up Virginia at 5pm, but wanted to stop by the house to do a little ‘decorating’, since it is our anniversary. Got to the office on time, barely, but Virginia was feeling lousy with a bad cold and runny nose. She said she did not feel like our usual nightly swim and instead of going out to eat, we picked up some Chinese carry out (sweet-and-sour chicken)and are at home at our ‘decorated’ table. It was very good. We both went to sleep early.