Tuesday
25th November 1997 - presprespresprespres....
From
John Storey........
This
morning was spent cleaning the AASTO. By lunchtime it was
inhabitable again, with hardly a trace of rockwool or brown
slime. The bad news for our wives and partners is that we've
spent so much time cleaning over the past two weeks that neither
of us will want to pick up a vacuum cleaner or duster again
for months.
The
AASTO seems pretty healthy, although it's running too hot.
It seems that there's enough heat coming directly off the
TEG and exhaust pipe that even with the freon valves wide
open it maintains about 30C inside. This isn't actually such
a bad thing, as it it means we can work with the window open
and minimise the risk of asphixiation. I'm told that if the
oxygen levels in the room drop too low then the burners will
simply shut down - whether they will do so before or after
I do is not something I want to experiment with.
What
we need is a canary - maybe a budgerigar would do at a pinch.
Sadly,
the AASTO no longer makes whale sounds. It's probably because
the thermostat is wide open and not throttling the freon flow.
The only sound is the gentle roar of the burners, and the
liquid freon trickling back into the storage tank. This has
none of the charm of the whale noise, and instead sounds a
lot like a faulty toilet cistern.
This
afternoon we hooked up the ELGIPS battery chargers to run
off the AASTO bus, so we're now completely self sufficient.
It's a great feeling to sit in the AASTO and realise that
you could just as easily be almost anywhere on the entire
antarctic continent. Come dinner time, though, and you're
glad your're at the South Pole (fresh asparagus, crab and
prawn creole, fresh grapefruit...)
The
sapphire window arrived with Al Fowler. Ant keeps unwrapping
it and looking at it and then putting it away again. A 5"
diameter disc of sapphire is a mighty fine thing. Sooner or
later we're going to have to summon up the courage to bolt
it onto something.
Mcba
- important question: is it possible to make the ACER 386
boot up as a normal MSDOS machine? For that matter, can the
super be persuaded to do same?
It
turns out that the you-beaut fibre-optic ethernet thingies
that Ant charmed out of the communications people belong to
someone else, so we're back to square one on that score.
Another
important question for mcba: is "rotma" a move to
an absolute position in steps or degrees?
This
morning the AGO service crew left on a Twin Otter to AGO-2.
It's an awfully flimsy looking plane after the Hercs. This
afternoon they called back on HF SSB radio to say that they'd
arrived at the site to find there weren't any lifting pulleys
(needed to jack the AGO up above the accumulating snow drifts),
and could they borrow ours. Naturally we were pleased to be
able to help out, particularly after they'd put such an effort
into restoring the AASTO. The pulleys will be flown to AGO-2
in another Twin Otter tomorrow.
It's
amazing how well the various computers, electronics, motors
etc have survived one of the coldest South Pole winters in
history. It seems possible now to make a list of things that
survive freezing and those that don't:
1.
Don't survive:
Sonnenschein
batteries
Some computer disks
People
2.
Do survive:
Everything
else
Did
I mention that we experimented a bit with the stepper motor
rates and came up with the following that work pretty well:
min 200, cal 400, ham 200, max 500, accel 25.
Abu
is pumping down well, and Ant and Al have been rushing around
orgainising things. A potentially serious hitch is that the
fibre link from MAPO to SPIREX is the wrong type, and incompatible
with Abu. At best we'll have to chop the ends off the fibres
and repolish them for the new termination; at worst we'll
have to wait until the right fibres are flown in. Fred is
making the "dog-house" that protects the elevation
motors from the snow. Mark and Mike are hitting each other
with large, heavy things to determine who will have the privilege
of making up more of our cables.
We've
lugged the ACER 386 across to the AASTO, where it taks up
90% of the remaining space. It works, and can be telnetted
to. We'll start incorporating it into the system in a more
permanent manner once we've debugged a few things. It has
an AWFULLY LOUD FAN, which is about to meet with an accident.
This
afternoon one of the Hercs got the pitch control of a propellor
jammed. Their first approach to solving the problem was to
open the throttles and hit "coarse". The resulting
blast of wind nicely cleared the area behind them of people,
bulldozers and other objects not tied down, and sent a snow
flurry rolling across the plateau that could be seen for minutes
later. Their second approach was to taxi aound a bit, *without*
first turning on the flashing red lights that warn you of
approaching aircraft. As I crossed the skiway I looked over
my shoulder to find I was being pursued by a gazillion horsepower
of pure grunt, with four ten-foot diameter people mincers
whirrling menacingly in front of it. This is one situation
where you do not necessarily insist on your right of way.
They must have got it fixed eventually, because it later took
off (though it took most of the 14,000 foot runway to do so).
If
you were a computer and one of your Dallases had ceased to
dangle, you would probably be moved to utter 4-letter words.
However, it's unlikely that "pres" would be one
of them. Nevertheless, when I type "DS INIT" into
the super, it responds with "presprespresprespres...",
and then refuses to tell me the temperature of any of them.
The problem can be fixed by disconnecting the Dallas on the
NISM mounting flange. I assume it's somehow shorting out the
whole chain. We'll look into it - this is the Dallas that
would have copped the full wrath of the brown slime when the
NISM went into brown-slime cryopumping mode.
The
"round the world" race is a Christmas Eve tradition
in which people race around the skiway, taking in all 24 time-zones
as they do so. I'm told it has always been won by runners,
although skiers and mountain bikers have also competed. This
year Matt Newcombe has arrived with a very fine Cannondale
V-500 with Gortex cables and 2.5" wide snow tyres. I'd
say he's in with a real chance.
We
still don't have any alligator clips!!! This is awful. Before
we come down again in January I'm going to buy $400 worth
of alligator clips, and ship them down with "URGENT"
in big letters on the crate. It is impossible to measure stuff
using multimeter probes unless you've got four hands. The
Fluke is so smart it refuses to let you plug anything in unless
it's a safety-approved probe, just in case you electrocute
yourself. (On the "ohms" range???) The result is
that you end up attaching those stupid little clips that someone
send down last year instead of alligator clips to the end
of the probes and dangling the whole thing in space in such
a way that you either blow up whatever it was you were trying
to measure or electrocute yourself anyway.
We
could also use a thermal wire stripper down here.
Other
things we need to buy are:
1.
A labeller - like the one we used last year. Andre - could
you check out the "Brother" catalog please.
2.
A spare Australian flag (Aust. Geog.)
3.
A budgerigar (and perhaps a backup one)
Cheers,
John
 
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