[Today’s run: 5 miles]
Today we had a “maintenance window” at the office so I did not go to Starkville for the running group. Instead I did 5 miles in our neighborhood.
Part of our maintenance was to replace the broken network switch which had our DRAC/ILO console ports and disk array maintenance ports plugged into it. And we did an OS update on our main database server. That network switch has been dying since a week ago Monday, one of many things which decided to be broken about that time.
On the home front, I ordered and received a final amplifier module for the FM transmitter and I got that installed at the end of the week. I was able to run the pre-amp into a dummy load and that kept our streaming going. While that was happening I got the old amp and the big heat sink out of the chassis, removed everything from the heat sink, drilled and tapped new holes for the new amp. Thursday evening I got the new amp and the remains of the old parts installed on the heat sink. During the lunch hour I shut down the transmitter for about 20 minutes while I got everything hooked back up. I fired it up and low output (about 60 Watts) and it was looking pretty good. Over the course of the day we moved that up and now we are running our assigned output.
So the radio station is back in business.
I had read in the amp module instructions to watch the temperature and not go over 55C. So I dug out a temperature probe which came with one of my cheapie digital volt meters from Harbor Freight and taped that probe on to the heat sink with a spot of Gorilla Tape. It was showing 50+, and that is not directly touching the amp module. So I’ve done some experimenting to increase the airflow through the heatsink. Right now I have it showing about 40C by directing the airflow and adding two small fans on the front to push air through the heat sink.
My two little fans came from an HP server that has been sitting around here doing nothing. It’s an old PA-RISC box which I had scrounged up as a practice platform for an OS upgrade at the office. That box is very obsolete now. So I stole the fans (4) and I’m using 2 in the transmitter.
We still have a few causalities from that day-of-things-breaking, the main one being the A/C in the car. It seems I had hit some road debris (I vaguely remember) and something punctured the A/C condenser (radiator-like thingy up in front of the car’s radiator). We take that in for a $800 repair session next week. My wife is relieved because it isn’t her fault, and she really does know how to operate the buttons. I’m glad they found the problem.
Picture: bean field this morning during my run. 63F when I left the house, very nice.
