(Photos promised but will have to wait for bandwidth to upload)
After arriving at the Amtoli upazila (district) office late Saturday morning we began work on the radios. Saturday we tore down the existing antennas, replaced one of the coax cables, installed the new VHF and HF antennas on the mast, got the VHF radio up and running, and assembled the HF radio. The first test of the new VHF radio had us scratching our heads for a bit until we discovered an error in the software. A quick fix later we were communicating with other CPP VHF stations in the vicinity. General consensus was that the quality had improved.. that’s good.
Sunday we trained 15 radio operators and finished the installation of the HF antenna. This was not without a challenge. Tom asked for a ladder to get up on the roof of a building to anchor one of the ends of the antenna. Three long pieces of bamboo were delivered along with a length of rope. Apparently the best they could do for a ladder was to lash the three lengths of bamboo together. Ladders as we know them are not available. After completing the preliminary install we tuned the new antenna to optimize the operation, connected the HF radio to the new antenna and tested it. The test back to Dhaka was excellent and another test to a remote HF station was also excellent. Both stations said the quality of the communication was much better than before.. let’s hope it was our work and not a sunspot cycle!
Some final work on grounding and we'd completed the work at Amtoli on schedule. Now we've moved on to Barguna where work starts on Monday.
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