New Strings

G'Day.

Probably about time I wrote another update.

Well, the weekend is almost over, they say time flies when you're having fun, and this year seems to be speeding up.
I had a fairly interesting week out at the mine, it was the quietest week out there that I've yet experienced which made a change. Gave me a good chance to get a good look around some of the repeater sites and try to get my head around how they are set up.

The Tuesday was pretty wet as it had been raining, unfortunately the truck I had only has ATs on it... I could have done with the ute I originally had which had MTs. I was slipping and sliding around all over the show... going at about 10KM/H sideways down the main haul road is interesting to say the least. I took my video camera with me this time, so hopefully I have managed to capture some interesting footage. There are a couple of spots where I had to drop the camera to grab the steering wheel when the truck decided to rapidly change direction in the mud.

I also somehow managed to crack the windscreen, every bump I went over (and there are a lot at a mine) caused it to crack a little further, so I've now got a crack a foot long across the windscreen. The guy going out to the mine this week has to use this truck too, as the usual mine truck is still away, so by the time he gets back the windshield will probably be split in half.

Since it was a quiet week it was a good chance to get some video of the big machines out there, and eventually I might put some online.

I spent half a day trying to find a site that I hadn't been to before, just to find it was half buried by rock... good old miners. They called up moaning about radio reception to their OCE and I happened to hear, so I jumped on the channel and said "Nixon's here, I'm currently looking at it, seeing as you guys buried my repeater I haven't got many options here." They replied: "Oh it wouldn't have been us..."

I don't see thousands of tons of rock moving around on it's own...

I ended up putting a portable repeater trailer up there to get them going. While I was driving along this emu jumps out in front of me and takes off up the track... I got some good video footage of that too. Took me a bit by surprise, in NZ you don't really see giant 2 legged birds jumping out in front of you. Seeing as there's no Moas left.

Also had a couple of skippys try and commit hari kari in front of my truck, they bound out in front of you and then sit in the middle of the road until you slam on the anchors and screech to a halt, then they carry on bouncing away.

Right, better carry on and take the supervisors lawn mower back to him.
Here's a few pics.

TTFN