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

[EJ Jones]

Hi Jussi

Sorry to hear about all the problems, especially with this miserable weather.   Hopefully everything will run with the bouvet operation coming. I actually rotated my antennas at bouvet  in case I have a rotator malfunction at the last minute.  After visiting Jussi’s QTH, I can vouch for the group that it wouldn’t be a lot of fun going between the house and the shack in this weather

EJ

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________________________________
From: adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net <adxa-bounces at mailman.qth.net> on behalf of Jussi Eloranta <eloranta at aa6kj.hopto.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2026 11:47:33 AM
To: 'ADXA' <adxa at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: [ADXA] winter storm - all is well :-)

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)


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