21-05-2009
The road up to Vudee is steep and narrow!
We dropped two ofour passengers in Vudee at the old mission.
The road further on is getting repared now!
This is the old electricity meter at the church in Ndolwa
The earth cable rund down here up again on the other side and then from there up to the transmitter!
We had to fix the battery again
Unloading of the antenna when we climbed the mountain
Steepwayup the Shengenna
The rain has washed the cable free
The shelter did not open
Exchanging the antenna
It is getting dark until we had replaced the antenna
Unfortunately
Evangelist Eliatosha Mnzava, who helped us to set up the Booster for the Paare Mountains
and helped us all the time since, is now in Dar Es Salaam.
His son, still going to the secondary school is taking care of the booster these days. We
solved many problems just by calling him by phone and he did the work at the booster site.
That is the reason why we did not come to the booster site in person for the last 3 years!
We noticed an intermittent fault with the antenna for quite some time. But now it was
continuous and we had to exchange the antenna. This antenna is at that transmitting place
since the last 8 years, and there is a hush, windy weather at that place. No wonder some
contacts went bad with the wind playing and the rain corroding all the contacts!
We are thankful the studio driver could bring us there with the studio car, since many
people were needed to bring down the antenna pipe, and the Box car has just 3 regular
seats.
We had to stop in Same at the office of Tanesco. We had to return the form to get a own
electricity meter for our transmitter. Since the evangelist changed we are no longer
welcomed to use a common meter with the church congregation. Since it took a long time to
open a new electricity account, we left the money with the manager and passed by again on
the way back to fetch the receipts.
We really feared the way up in the mountains could be slippery during the rainy season.
But actually the people there got a druid and the road was dusty. We stopped in Vudee,
where German missionaries started to bring the Good News 100 years ago, to drop 2
passengers and continued to the church of Dolwa, where the electricity meter is located.
When the driver wanted to start the car again he noticed that there was no connection to
the battery any more. The battery holding backed was broken and the battery lying on the
engine. It was close that the battery case was broken and the acid finished. We tried to
fix the battery with a binding wire and to reconnect the broken terminals. As soon as we
succeeded we continued our safari across the next valley to the point we could start to
climb Mt Shengenna up to the transmitter.
We took the way the
cable takes to bring up the electricity to the transmitter. On some places the rain has
washed down the soil above the soil above the wire, and it is dangerous if the
cable is open. On the way people could destroy it with a panga, and on the bush area a
fire can burn it. So we left some money with the person in charge to burry the cable again
everywhere. As soon as enough money will be available it should be replaced with an armed
earth cable to be more resistive to injuries.
It took nearly a
complete hour until we came to the transmitter. Unfortunately we did not succeed to open
the door. We called Evangelist Eliatosha in Dar, but even that did not help to open the
door. We decided to take down the antenna first. Since the antenna cable was short we had
to take even out the screw at the bottom to move it some bit.
Now opening the old
antenna gave us an headache after one of our pliers broke. We simply did not had enough
power to turn the socked of the old antenna to take it off. It was so badly rusted. We
sucked all in penetrating oil, but it did not move. We hammered against it, cut all the
old antenna, but no movement.
It was nearly six in
the evening we said "If God wants us to repair this transmitter He will show us a way
to open this socked!", and I tried to look again through the tools I had with me. I
found an old adjustable spanner. We fixed it on the socked. I hold the pipe with the
wrangle and Temper hammered the spanner to turn the socked. By putting all his Force left
it started to move! We could replace the antenna, took it up, but had to lower it again,
because we had turned the telemetry antenna around. We took it up again. Meanwhile Zawadi
had succeed really to open the shelter. We cleaned it. Unfortunately the meter switch of
the transmitter did not work any more. So until we could receive the telemetry data in
Moshi we did not knew, whether we were successful with our antenna!
It was nearly dark
when we finished, and we had go back again to the car! And all the way back to Same, where
the tomaked road started we had ro reconnect the battery again and again several times..
On the road we
compared the signal of Radio Maria in Maua with ours in Kidia. There is really such a big
difference if we could use 2000 Watts instead of 20 Watts, and we have to not to loose our
listeners!
We arrived in Moshi
around 10 o’clock at night.
Martin
Tuning and sealing the new antenna in Moshi
