The past two mornings, the temperature at the transmitter site has been 44F at 8am.\u00a0 By 9:30am it had already warmed up to 62F.<\/p>\n
I forgot to mention something in out list of unanticipated events yesterday.\u00a0 About an hour after the morning broadcasts ended, the automation system went ‘berserk’ with lights flashing and bells ringing.\u00a0 Fortunately we were off the air and broadcasts were not affected.\u00a0 The problem was traced to low voltage from batteries.\u00a0 The special circuit inserted in series with the battery charger to prevent overcharging had failed resulting in no charge.\u00a0 Graham and I decided to use a resistor to replace the special circuit until Hans, the designer of the circuit, can repair it.<\/p>\n
About an hour before transmissions ended this morning, the monitor on TX2 went blank.\u00a0 We installed a replacement monitor, but it too did not work.\u00a0 I tried the replacement monitor in the other transmitters and it worked in both.\u00a0 This pointed to a problem with the TX2’s video card.\u00a0 Since the transmitter still functions without the monitor, we waited until transmissions ended.\u00a0 Before swapping monitors, Klaus pressed the reset button on the TX2’s computer and the old monitor started working again.\u00a0 Problem solved!<\/p>\n
Next it was decided to test the 10,000 uf capacitor that had given problems on TX2 on Saturday and had ‘returned to life’ on Monday.\u00a0 We were concerned that it might be electrically leaky, or losing capacitance.\u00a0 When it was removed from the transmitter, it was charged to 35 volts.\u00a0 When measured with a digital voltmeter, the voltage was dropping at a rate of about 0.001 volts per second.\u00a0 This is about right considering the loading effect of the meter.\u00a0 We then calculated that a 1,000 ohm resistive load would cause a drop from 30 to 10 volts in about 10 seconds.\u00a0 This proved to be true.\u00a0 We then checked all the solder connections that could have caused the problems, but could find no bad ones.\u00a0 The mystery remains, so the spare capacitor with clip leads, ready for a quick connection, will remain for a while, just in case the problem should return.<\/p>\n
This afternoon, I calibrated the RF Drive Controllers on both TX1 and TX2.\u00a0 This involved tuning each transmitter to all the frequencies and antennas that it uses, finding out which one needs the most RF Drive, then calibrating the RF Controller on that one.\u00a0 Doing this on both transmitters took most of the afternoon.<\/p>\n
When I got ‘home’ this evening the temperature was 70F, both inside and outside the house.\u00a0 We had a supper of leftovers and hope to get to bed earlier tonight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The past two mornings, the temperature at the transmitter site has been 44F at 8am.\u00a0 By 9:30am it had already warmed up to 62F. I forgot to mention something in out list of unanticipated events yesterday.\u00a0 About an hour after the morning broadcasts ended, the automation system went ‘berserk’ with lights flashing and bells ringing.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[11,12],"class_list":["post-396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swaziland-2013","tag-11","tag-swaziland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":647,"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396\/revisions\/647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcguirereport.mcguireclan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}