Enough of the annoying noise; today it has to go. Dave arrived early and set about looking at previously unexplored possibilities. CCTV cameras weren’t to blame, but something closely associated with them was definitely dodgy. For one of the outside facing cameras, we had installed an IR source for night time illumination. Power for the source came from a plugpack, that provided 12v DC.

After about 5 years of operation, the plugpack tired of only delivering DC and added RF to its repertoire. A quick flick of the mains switch and the magnitude of noise reduction indicated the culprit had been caught. Time for a well deserved coffee…

The errant plugpack while having minimal components, was not a concerning noise source previously. Chances are one or more of the el-caps has run out of life. We’ll probably pull the caps and check for deterioration.

Now you see it…
Now you don’t – Noise be gone!

While up at the repeater level discussing the recently replaced batteries and potentially (stop the puns – now : ED) relocating them to a cooler location, someone keyed up a transmitter with 100% carrier and the lamp on the power diverter for the KiwiSDR antenna feed, lit up. The lamp dissipates the higher power before it can reach the Kiwi. It occurred to me that we had constructed our own version1 of HAL of “2001 – A Space Odyssey” fame…

JCN 9000 – our HAL lookalike . The glowing lamp is dissipating the excessive RF induced into the receiver antenna
HAL 9000 – “I’m sorry Dave…”

Installation of a new data fiber into the building provided some education / entertainment. After blowing the fiber from the road to the cable pit out the front of the building, the last part of the run was to get it upstairs. A conduit was already laid in, so it was a matter of a short run – well actually around 80m from the pit to upstairs. The fiber is propelled into the conduit through a gun, that also feeds the airflow that assists the travel. Two rubber wheels in the gun, clamp the fiber between them and power it forward. It took around a minute to “blow” the fiber through the short distance.

Fiber going in. The box at the lower part of the image holds 4000m of fiber
Fiber blowing gun or a hand holding a very small cone
A final test with a visible wavelength laser
  1. We used the letters JCN (Jumbo Charge Neutraliser)- two letters on from HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer), as the letters immediately following HAL – IBM have already been taken; how inconvenient ↩ī¸Ž