An early start for some, as it was Alpine Fault Net day. With on again off again rain, Dave ZL1DL elected to operate in comfort from inside the clubrooms, while Harry ZL1BK and Martin ZL3CK braved the outdoors.

Soon afterwards, others arrived at the clubrooms and the suggestion was made to rotate the large desk in the clubrooms by 90° to double the potential occupancy by seating a person either side. There has been an upswing in interest for writing code for microcontrollers and suitable space to accommodate laptops and project devices has been a little short in supply. That led to questioning the value of having the rack of Codan maritime HF receivers taking up space in the meeting room. A better location was the museum. However, to make room in the museum required another rack to be retired to “storage”1

The desk made all the harder to move with a load of valuable items onboard
Appreciating the weight of the rack to be moved downstairs, Harry rounds up some willing helpers… ( or is it “who stole the bicycles?” )

Even with all the receivers removed, the rack still required a few people to move it; thank goodness it was going down the stairs, not up.

Having moved the rack from the corner of the meeting room, and the desk away from the wall, we discovered a DC outlet and and antenna feed; how convenient. We checked the infloor cable duct and found the DC power feed went one way and the coax went another.

Harry giving a cable the “pull test”
This must be the emptiest cable duct in the building! In most ducts, the subfloor isn’t visible!

In following the DC feed, Harry found a number of individual 12v cables to various destinations running back to a distribution board outside the battery room. Cabling to the DB from the batteries is at least 100mm² ( could be 200mm² ! ); the feeds to upstairs are around 16mm², so Harry suggested we parallel the feed to upstairs to minimise voltage drop. This started another voyage of discovery. However, Harry’s methodical recording of what went where got it sorted. We did learn that our assumption that the two colours (orange and red) used for DC feeds were individually allocated to 24v and 12v, was somewhat flawed. Still, the tracing has been sorted and and some large crimps will follow.

The antenna coax that terminates in the meeting room went across to the riser to the “repeater level” of the tower. Definitely a “how convenient”! A quick patch to an unused yagi on the tower and we have a useable antenna.

Meanwhile, the rack for the Codans had found it’s new home and was loaded up once more with the multiple receivers.

I thought you labeled them as to which one goes where…
I’m sure there’s something else over here I could be doing

We also sorted out the faulty timer for the security lights and tidied up the light switch for the generator room. A busy day, but still plenty to do!

  1. Storage: In Radio Amateur terms, a requirement for a large area to accumulate items that ‘could be useful’ (and typically are never required again ) for an indeterminate length of time. ↩︎