Today was a bright and sunny day but windy, so it was pretty chilly. We
decided to put off taking down the tent for this reason. Our first job
for this morning was to test a new antenna for the iridium phone. At the
moment we are using an antenna straight off the phone however the new
one is a swanky white number which needs to be installed outside. The
phone calls UNSW every hour and downloads data but the link has been a
bit flaky. We found a convenient sized wooden pole and I cut it to size
to slide the antenna on top, with Jon looking on impressed with my skill
with the jigsaw. Looking for a place to put it we could either plant the
pole in the snow somewhere - difficult - or poke it out one of the
portholes of the AASTINO - less difficult. We decided on the latter. To
hold the pole steady we put the bottom in the copper pipe squishing vice
and then tied the ever trusty tent ropes from brackets in the roof
around the top of the pole - voila!

While Jon went on with his favourite task of beating the supervisor
computer into submission, I went around doing some little jobs. I wired
up the heaters for the web camera on the roof and for the Nigel fibre
holder in the roof. We definitely knew that Nigel's heater was working
when I saw melted silicon from between the two copper pipes of the
holder dripping down towards the electronics rack - it's okay though,
nobody panic, we stopped it before the supervisor computer got covered
in goo. I then went into destruction mode and drilled a 4cm hole in the
side of the AASTINO, this wasn't just for the hell of it but rather for
a cable for the instrument Arcetri University is having installed in
January. My next task was to try and build a differential amplifier
circuit for the AWS pressure sensor. The problem here though was that
the old circuit had been covered in silicon and when Jon removed the
silicon he also removed most of the components...so we didn't know how
to rewire it. We tried to piece it together like a puzzle and came up
with one idea which looked alright...but it didn't work. Casting that
aside my next task was to retrieve one of the witness mirrors from a
pole outside. (The mirrors are witnesses of the Antarctic winter
occuring). With the comment "don't drop it" ringing in my ears I set off
outside with screwdriver in hand...about a minute later I was back
inside seeking help. Due to the "don't drop it" and "don't touch it"
comments I was reluctant to remove it by myself so I dragged Jon
reluctantly away from the computer to help. We sucessfully took it down
and carefully placed it inside a special plastic witness mirror
box...without putting our fingers all over it.

There was another birthday this evening which always brings out the
champagne and special dessert - this was a lemon merange pie that was
very good. There was also some form of alcohol made of prunes that I was
urged to try, unsual but good.We had to go back out to the AASTINO after
dinner to finish writing some software and I managed to talk Vincent the
chef into digging out some mars bars for us. This chocolate had the rare
privalege of having a use by date that was in this year (feb) and had
only been frozen to -80 degrees once. At one stage we were eating
chocolate with a best before date of 1999. We left the AASTINO sometime
after midnight with the sun shining in the beautiful blue sky.



- Suze