Shot Caller

G'day.

It has been an interesting week, this one. Monday was supposed to be a fairly straight forward day, a nice "easy" job for the local port, or so I thought. Of course, one can never take anything as gospel, and when I showed up it became rapidly apparent that the task at hand may not quite be as simple as first thought. Long story shortened somewhat, I ended up having to return to work to fabricate a bracket and some mounts for the antennas, and locate a cabinet in which to house the equipment. That took most of the morning, and by the time we returned with the gear it was well past lunch time. As I had made sure to measure thrice and weld once, luckily the bracket lined up perfectly and from that point the job went fairly smoothly.

Tuesday started out relatively straight forward too, I went and completed the port job which we had started on Monday. Everything went as it should, which is very unusual for the jobs I usually undertake. However, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I finished off there and ended up spending the rest of the day aligning some super urgent repeaters which we needed to get out to a job the next day. That took somewhat longer than anticipated, and I didn't end up leaving work until about 10:00 that night.

Wednesday I had a job out at Moura to have a look at a few things for the local coal seam gas company. It was a bit unknown the exact details of what I was going to be doing, as they had several smaller jobs all rolled into one day. I packed as much miscellaneous equipment as I could, and headed out. The job started with some repairs, luckily these were pretty straight forward, mostly broken aerials and that sort of thing. I tackled another couple of jobs, and then decided to get into the main job of the day. This was to get some phone lines connected in an office block which was a good 40 odd meters away from the location of the PABX. I had been told that there was no copper run to the office, so I had come prepared to cable the entire way. Before getting stuck in with laying the cable, I decided to check out the existing panels and see where I could run my cable to. This is when I discovered that there was a panel in there labelled "phones to front office". Feeling an instant ray of hope, but not wanting to jinx the matter, I investigated further and discovered in the front office there was a panel labelled "phones to PABX". Hardly believing I could be this lucky, I tested the lines, and found they were dead. Thinking that it was all over, and I would have to run my cable anyhow, I unscrewed the panel to see where I could terminate my cable. Then I noticed that the cable pairs going to the rear of the panel were on different pins than the ones that this particular phone system required. The old ray of hope started shining again, and I performed some mirco surgery to the panel at both ends. I plugged it all in, and lo and behold, it worked.

I started to become very suspicious at this point, because things never go easily when I look at them, if there is a worst case scenario, you can bet that will be it. But not this time...

Seeing as I then had plenty of extra time up my sleeve, I ended up fixing a telemetry setup for them too, and then eventually hit the road back to Gladstone, a strangely successful mission for once...

Thursday, I headed out to another mine to run some new antenna feeders. We were going to have to use rope access to get to the roof, as the bucket truck wasn't going to reach, and it was going to be a bit of a pig to do. So, I took all the necessary equipment, got on site (and after the obligatory half hour of paperwork) we fired up the bucket truck and discovered that we could get it to within a meter of where we required to work. This made the job incredibly easy, and knocked a good couple of hours off the job time. Aside from the redbacks in the roof, we had no major dramas.
I ended up getting out of there well on time for once, which again, is very unusual...

Friday, I expected the worst. After a week of luck, surely it couldn't last. I hadn't got stuck. The truck hadn't broken down. I had all the parts I needed, the jobs were all successful... it was all too good to be true. Friday's job was a doddle. Or so I had been told. And to add to the day, work was putting on a BBQ at 3:00. All I was supposed to do is drive up to Rocky, show their guys how to put up a telo mast, and drive back again, well in time for the BBQ. Simple. Straightforward. Can't possibly go wrong. Right. Wrong.

I should have known better. I had become complacent. I should have known, "easy" jobs are NEVER EASY. I arose early, and drove up to Rocky. Just before you get to the Rocky office there is a rail crossing tied into an intersection. There just happened to be road works where I wanted to go, and it was down to a single lane with stop/slow men. (Yes, they are exactly like stop/go men, only different). I pulled up to the intersection, and gave way, as there were a steady stream of cars going past. At this point in time, I discovered two very important things. The first thing was, this rail road crossing did not have bells. The second thing was, the "give way" line is past the swing arc of the barrier arm. As I heard the distant "honk" of a large diesel locomotive, I also noticed the barrier arm on the opposite side coming down. I thought "that's unusual, I haven't seen this side coming down yet". There was good reason for that. The fact my roof isn't transparent just about explained it. I realised the imminent danger right at the last second, and only just managed to hurriedly reverse as the barrier cleared my retreating bullbar by only millimetres.

That close call over, I then had to wait 25 minutes before I could get moving again. The train that went through was very long and slow, and after that the stop/slow men let huge rush-hour-train-delayed queues through without thought to let poor old me in to the flow of traffic.

When I finally arrived to the Rocky branch, I needn't have worried about being late. Long story short we spent the best part of 2 and a half hours trying to work out exactly what the job entailed, as the person in charge had decided to take a "personal day" off work. Super convenient. After finally sorting out what the plan of attack was, we finally made it to the actual work site and began work. The job should have been straight forward, but we kept striking little setbacks. For example we had a fellow relatively new to radio comms do the connectors for us on the main feeders. We showed him how to do one, and he terminated 5 or 6 of these cables before we realised the plugs were the wrong gender. We searched the box of bits, and that was all we had. They had been ordered incorrectly. We sent one guy back to get some more correct connectors, and carried on with the rest of the job. A couple of hours in, a lady and half an office came running out and started yelling at us. We went down and asked what all the fuss was about, and it appeared they had lost all their internet and telephones and of course were blaming us. It didn't matter that we were on top of a completely different building, and we hadn't even drilled into the roof cavity yet, but apparently it must still be our fault. We humoured her and went for a look around, and then asked if she had an IT bloke there. In a big display of triumph, she marched us to the IT bloke who then proceeded to explain to her that it was a server issue and nothing to do with us whatsoever. Somewhat deflated, she let us get back to work.

After that, we had several other minor hiccups, but eventually got the job done. Unfortunately by this time it was about half past 5, and I was long overdue for the BBQ. Rush hour traffic in Rocky is mental, and by the time I hit the road back to Gladstone is was beginning to get dark. I finally arrived back at work, after spending 12 hours doing what was supposed to be the easiest job of the week... and the BBQ was long over. I knew my luck couldn't last.


Anyhow, I have a week back out at Moura next week, which should go pretty well. I'll be sure to let you know if it doesn't...

TTFN

Solid Rock

G'day.


It appears another couple of weeks have managed to slip by without me getting a chance to write much here. I've said it once and I imagine I shall say it again, time flies when you are having fun.

Trying to think back to what has actually happened since the last brief update, and I realise it is actually quite a lot. We went out to a mine about 4.5 hours away a couple of weeks back, to put in a new channel which turned out to be semi urgent. It was a complete new site we were putting in, so this meant taking out a new hut on the truck, a new tower on the landcruiser ute, and then a couple of 100 series cruisers with tools and the actual radio gear. At one point that week we had 6 Nixon techs out in that area, the poor old mine probably thought the invasion had come.

It was a fairly straight forward site to put in, I won't go into detail as 90% of the three actual readers of this document will not find it the slightest bit entertaining. I will say, however, that the mine had attempted to "help out", and basically made the job more difficult. They had what in effect was a "spare" tower available, which they decided to pre stand up to try to speed the process. Unfortunately it was the wrong tower for the job and thus we had to remove that one before we could put our new one up. Not only that, but they got the site orientation incorrect so we also had to re measure out the guy points. Luckily, like most mine installs, the guy points are tires filled with concrete, so they aren't too bad to move provided you have a crane handy. Which, as it happens, we did.

Anyhow, that job took most of a week. That week it got colder and colder, and come the Friday there were four of us in our jackets all trying to hide inside this 2m x 2m hut to keep out of the wind. As I was explaining to the Australians, although by Kiwi terms it wasn't actually that cold, I wasn't dressed for the occasion. Where in NZ I would have been wearing 4 layers, here I only had a shirt and a lightweight jacket on, so it felt pretty cold to me.

At least my truck heater worked.

I reckon this winter is a lot colder than last winter here actually, either that or I am just becoming more acclimatised to the insane heat during summer.

Moving along, that weekend a couple of mates were heading down to the sunshine coast, so I decided to tag along as I hadn't been down that way and was pretty keen to see what it was all about. After getting up super early as was arranged.... 2 hours went by before old mate finally showed up to pick me up. Best laid plans of mice and men, and all that. Finally got on the road, and headed toward Brisbane. Got held up at an accident scene at a place called Childers, that slowed us for over an hour, so by the time we actually hit our destination the trip had taken around 6.5 hours. We were staying at a placed called Mooloolaba, which is around 90 KMs North of Brisbane. It was one of those fairly spontaneous trips with not a lot planned, so we managed to get around a little and see some sights. We went to this huge go kart track for a go, cost about $55au for half an hour, but it was pretty well set up. One of my mates got the fastest kart this side of Jupiter and managed to lap me three times. It didn't matter what anyone did, they couldn't keep up with him. Even on the straights he would hare away from everyone and be 10 meters ahead by the end of the straight.

We also went to a driving range to hit some golf balls around. There were about 5 kangaroos hopping around the range, pretty game roos if you ask me. I saw one joey get knocked on the head with a golf ball, he stumbled around a bit like he was drunk and after a few minutes hopped away with his mother. I imagine he will have a lump on his skull for a while.

Unfortunately it was cloudy and overcast and raining on and off a lot of the time, but by Monday it cleared up a bit more and we finally got to see the sun. Which was good, I was beginning to wonder why they called it the "sunshine coast".

Whilst all this was going on, old mate Ryan had been in Sydney buying a new car. The plan was for him to meet us in Mooloolaba and I was going to get a ride with him back to Gladstone. He arrived in Mooloolaba late on Sunday night, and we all went out to a Moroccan restaurant for dinner. All was well and good. He headed off as he had just driven around 1000 KMs, and the others and I headed into town for a while. Next morning, we wanted to get an early start to get back to Gladstone at a reasonable hour. We headed over to where the car was parked in the hotel carpark, and went to start the car. No go. Flat battery, it transpired. After much scratching of heads, we decided to try to crash start the car. No cigar. We developed a plan B, and went and bought some jumper leads. We sent Ryan off on a mission to ensnare some help from a passer by, and he returns with quite possibly one of the smallest cars in the world to try to jump start us. I think he would have had more luck jump starting from a roller skate, but however, we decided to give it a shot.

No go. Of course, that would have been far to easy. We thanked the lovely couple for their attempt at assistance, and while they put their car back into a matchbox, developed a plan C. We removed the battery from the new car, and took it over to a 4WD with a big alternator and jumped it on there for 20 mins in a feeble attempt to get some juice into this pancake flat battery. Still no go. The car would turn over, but not catch. As time was rapidly going by, we determined the next best course of action was probably to call the RACQ into action, as we didn't know anyone else in the town to help out. After paying a modest membership fee, an hour or so later the RACQ showed up. After making much comment about the problem being the fact the car was an audi, he determined that the battery was probably knackered and he suspected the key had probably become unpaired from the immobiliser. We attempted to get onto the audi dealers for key programming instructions, but being a public holiday, no one was at home.

By now it was lunch time, we still had around 5 hours of travel to go, and I had to be out at a mine the next morning. The RACQ said there was nothing more they could do, they suggested staying another night at the hotel and towing it to the audi dealer in the morning. So, long story short, Ryan and his Mrs ended up staying another night, and I (only just) managed to catch a ride back with my other mates which had just left.

So, eventually, the next day they towed the car to the dealership, and they ended up selling him a new battery and fixing up the keycodes and sent him on his way. When he finally arrived back in Gladstone late that evening, he parked the car in the garage, and we thought nothing more about it. Until, about 10 minutes later, we heard a whooshing sound from the garage. We headed out and discovered that the radiator fan was running full tilt. This would explain the flat battery, then. We managed to locate the fuse and solved the fan problem. After performing some research, it appears the fan is run direct off the battery via a thermostat, so we suspect that particular component may well be at fault. Should be a fairly straight forward fix.

New cars aside, this week has been fairly straight forward. A couple of us put up a couple of new 30 foot masts on some stupidly tall workshops, with the help of a 50 tonne slew crane. No major dramas there, apart from a few vital components that were missing. We managed to work our way around that one though. A day in the workshop catching up on bench work on Friday, which was also good. It's been quite a while since I've had a day in the workshop, not that I'm complaining though, I'm enjoying getting out and about and doing some interesting work.

Right, I better carry on and go and do something productive for the day, seeing as I somehow managed to sleep for 13 hours straight on Friday night. I had been running low on sleep all week so obviously it finally caught up with me.
I'll leave you with the customary photographs, and the sound of an audi attempting to start in the garage but not quite firing... not quite all problems solved, then. Next time someone says "I wouldn't buy a Range Rover, they have electrical problems!" I'll reply with "Alright then, can I interest you in a nice Audi instead?"

TTFN