Random Writings

Apologies for the ‘radio silence’ since New Year but, as many of you have guessed, I’ve been very busy indeed. We’ve been a little bit short-handed in the comms team since all three of our radio operators have been away working at Fossil Bluff and Sky Blu, two remote fuel depots that get used to refuel aircraft during the summer season. Actually, only two of them have been away at a time – just after Owen returned from Sky Blu, Mark’s gone out to replace him. This is a rather roundabout way of saying that Andy and I have worked extra shifts on the radio and have had relatively little time off, especially at weekends. Anyway, we’ve also been doing some project work as well as the usual flight following and field party scheds – we’ve been building a Really Big Antenna! This is like a giant TV aerial and is mounted on top of a stumpy little tower on top of Rothera Point – and it can be turned around by an electric motor to direct the signal to distant field parties. The proper name is the RLPA – the Rotatable Log-Periodic Antenna, and we’ve been working on it since just before New Year.

The tower, before the antenna and gearbox were fitted

We started in the aircraft hangar, putting together a giant Meccano kit made from aluminium with very poor instructions. If you think IKEA instructions are incomprehensible, don’t buy one of these! The boom that supports the antenna elements is 40 feet long (sorry for the imperial units – the antenna is made in the USA so all the dimensions are in feet and inches…)
and is held together with about two hunded nuts and bolts, all of which we did up by hand.
Having built all this, Mat the Mechanic helped us load it onto a flatbed trailer, and we dragged it up the hill to finish the assembly. Attached to the boom are 16 elements, which are tapering aluminium tubes that extend from each side. These are very long and quite whippy. At each point where the aluminium tubes join we had to polish the joint with emery cloth and apply an anti-oxidant grease to make a good electrical connection.

Once the antenna was assembled, the fun part began. We had to move it about twenty metres across an uneven snow surface and then hoist it onto the top of the tower and fasten it to the rotator. After a few ideas were considered, we went for a “people power” approach. Fourteen of BAS’s finest staff lifted the antenna off the trailer and carried it across to the waiting crane. Several tense minutes and a good deal of “left-hand-down-a-bit”, jiggling and brute force later, Andy and I bolted it to the rotator mountings and breathed a sigh of relief!

People power!

Easy does it…

Up and away!

Bolting it on

Since then we’ve been doing the much more tedious job of cable laying- all sorts of power, data and signal cables have to be fed out to the antenna and its ancillary kit, so we’ve been dragging cables across the frost-shattered rock surface of the point and laboriously attaching them to catenary wires with cable ties. Actually, Andy’s done most of the laborious attaching, and I’ve done most of the laborious ladder-repositioning, tool-passing and cable untangling. We’re now about 60% done on the cables – they just need to go across the yard to the Ops Tower – Pat’s been showing us how to use the “cherry-picker” hydraulic platform today, but it was too windy to do any work with it this afternoon, so that’s a project for tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll have the system all wired up by the end of next week.

Thanks to Agnieszka for her excellent photographs and mast-climbing skills! There are more pictures here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 1:54 am and is filed under Antarctica.