Dynasonde diary

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2005

3 Jan 2005
Filaments and HV found off, Dynamite also. Circuit breaker had failed ! (Helge).
25 Jan 2005
MTR back in Tromso. Moved PRE interference up a bit.
27 Jan 2005
Between 03:30 and 03:40 HV and filaments off, fuse OK. Switched on again (when ?) and all works.
31 Jan 2005
19:22 UT, power break on whole site.
2 Feb 2005
HV switched off again between 03:40 and 03:50 UT. later on again
4 Feb 2005
16.47:54 UT, PC clock found to be 36 sec slow. Reset it.
about 8 Feb 2005
Installed 200 GB IDE disk on Dynamite to replace the failed 70GB SCSI disk.
10 Feb 2005
Found HV and filaments off again. On trying on again heard arcing. Troubleshooting HPTx. Leave HPTx off.
11 Feb 2005
Troubleshooting, replaced unmarked 1 kOhm wirewound resistor that looked burnt but still HV fuse blows.
12 Feb 2005
Troubleshooting but still leave running on A300.
15 Feb 2005
Troubleshooting. Suspect V3 bad.
16 Feb 2005
Replace V3 (Y8-2190) with Y8 3536. Running with HPTx.
23 Feb 2005
About 20 UT noticed HV and filaments off. Run on A300 only.
9 Mar 2005
Put in A300 amplifier borrowed from Lycksele dynasonde while we try to fix transistors on board A48A on our own one.
08 Apr 2005
First ski tour of antenna inspection.
13:55-13:58 UT, raised north end of north half-dipole of N antenna by about 50cm. Snow is about 1.5 m below dipoles.
14:07 UT, raised centre end of soth half-dipole of N antenna by about 15 cm.
14:12 UT, raised centre end of east half-dipole of the E antenna by about 15cm.
14:28 UT, raised north end of northern half-dipole of S antenna by about 70 cm.
Transmitting antenna looks OK. Snow is about 30 cm below feed point.
9 June 2005
HPTx working again reliably. Has been off since 23 February, 18:00 UT. Basically a burnt connection in the HV power supply, and an arcing tube were the main problems. But a practically shorted varistor and several others were also replaced (providing bias to the upper two tubes).
13 June 2005
Dynasonde off for extensive LPA (Log-periodic array) transmitting antenna maintenance. Cleared trees under south half of LPA.
9 Sept 2005
Put back the original A300, repaired with a new driver card obtained from Tom Berkey.
30 Sept 2005
Between 14 and 15 UT the dynasonde stopped because the Ailtech finally failed. It was the 5V power supply. Fuse and transistor had gone-
10 Oct 2005
Ailtech replaced by the other, original one which had to have the +5V transistor in the power supply replaced.
19 Oct 2005
HV switched off between 18:50 and 19:00 UT. No HV fuse blown. Switching on HV next day worked.
21 Oct 2005
HV switched off again between 14:30 and 14:40 UT.
22 Nov 2005
Replaced the 133 MHz Pentium-II in dynpc with the old UPC motherboard 'PCA-6176'. Had to re-work the whole PC crate, re-arranging things. In the BIOS had to change IRQ7 from 'PCI/ISA PnP' to Legacy ISA. This board works well, requiring minimal effort to get running.
29 Nov 2005
After repairing the "Spare" Ailtech (Stian) which had a faulty power supply, put it into the dynasonde. This one has a much small output amplitde variation with frequency than the other one.

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