[ADXA] winter storm - all is well :-)

[Jussi Eloranta]

Hi Everyone,

I hope that everyone is OK and no broken antennas. My antennas survived 
the storm but there were some unfortunate events yesterday (when the 
storm was at its worst):

1) The tower stopped rotating. OK, now that is scary. Then did some 
testing and it turns but the pulse counter from the tower is not sending 
any signal to the Green Heron box. It was rather unpleasant to start 
debugging this at the tower base with the cold, wind and small pieces of 
ice coming down. Finland can get cold but there is minimal wind and 
certainly no ice coming down. Anyway, the Hall sensor had gotten loose, 
fallen off of its bracket and landed in front of the rotating arm that 
turns with the tower rotor. Of course, one of the leads had broken off 
from the base of the sensor so that it could not be repaired. But I had 
another Hall sensor and started installing that. Eventually got 
everything working again. Did probably ten different trips to the tower 
base because it was not possible to work continuously there. 
Recalibrated the controller and all was well again. Well for a while...

2) Then just after working kp5 on 60m last night, the radio started 
going crazy. Noise level S9+20dB with loud pops and A/D converted 
overflow warning blinking. This was late yesterday evening and the 
conditions outside were really bad. Anyway, it looked like something was 
possibly arcing and I had to jump in the car and drive to the shack. I 
am glad I have 4x4 truck but even that was struggling. In the shack 
everything looked normal except the radio was about to go through the 
roof. The first thought was that it is coming perhaps from a nearby 
power line (but that was repaired very recently), so turned the antennas 
a bit to see if that affects anything. Except the antenna did not turn - 
again. Started going outside and the lights outside my shack did not 
come on. And of course the flashlight had disappeared. Tried to check 
the tower base in the dark but nothing strange going on there. The 
breakers seemed OK too in the panel. However, then noticed that one of 
the space heaters that is powered from the same outlet as the tower 
rotor did not seem to have power. Checked the breaker again and looks 
like that breaker is defective. It had tripped but not all the way. So, 
disconnected the heater from that circuit and turned it back on. At this 
point the tower started rotating again but the terrible noise was still 
there. No change in noise level when turning the antenna meaning that it 
is coming most likely from my shack! The suspicion is that one the 
breakers was arcing under the heavy load of heaters that I had to run to 
keep the shack warm. I was done at this point and powered everything off 
from the panel for the night for safety. To be continued in the morning.

3) Turned power back on this morning and the noise is gone. Tested 
breakers one by one, turned the heaters on one by one. No noise. One of 
the heaters refused to turn on however. It is one of these fancy digital 
controlled heaters. That is the only thing that is not powered on at the 
moment and all seem good. So, either that heater was arcing or it took 
the load overboard so that something else was arcing. But the exact 
source of this problem is still unknown. By the way getting to the shack 
was not trivial. The snow situation was so bad that I almost got stuck 
in the pasture with the truck (I don't have chains). Barely made it back.

To conclude, none of this was really caused by the storm directly. Poor 
design, construction etc. will bite you immediately and especially when 
the conditions get bad (variation of Murphy's law). It is certainly no 
fun to debug and fix things when the weather is bad.

But otherwise things are going well here in the sticks. I am going to 
spend to day by - sleeping! Hope that everyone is safe!

Jussi (aa6kj)