Rotator Cage

Thursday was a public holiday in Chile, so I decided to spend the day working on my tower project. I purchased this RC-5 Rotator back in 2001, it's been sitting in a box ever since! Finally I've mounted it on a steel plate and created a cage around it to support the load bearing for the mast.

A recycled wheel bearing was found to be a perfect fit for the 1inch steel pipe used for the mask. I carefully welded the bearing to the cage. A quick coat of paint and the structure was ready for a rotation test using my VHF 9 ele Jaybeam for 2m.  It worked perfectly smoothly. The bearing is supporting the full weight of the mast and antenna as well as protecting the rotator from sideways sheer forces. 

Vegetable garden progress

The strawberry plants have began to flower, and the peas and beans are doing well. I harvested the bamboo sticks for the runner beans from the forrest nearby!

Vegetable garden coming to life

The 90+ strawberry plants are doing very well; the plastic covering helps keep the moisture in, stops weeds and grass from growing. This arrangement, with raised beds, helps keeps the fruit out of the dirt.

In the fore-ground we can see the peas, broad beans and running beans sprouting up nicely. 

Strawberries planted

Season for 'Diguenes'

Diguenes are a parasitic fungus that grow on 'coigues', 'hualles' and 'robles' - native trees in the south of Chile. They have a texture similar to mushrooms but the taste is very different. My Chilean family go nuts for these forrest treats, which appear after Chilean Independance Day (18th Sep), through to the start of summer. We are lucky to live in an area that has such an abundant supply!

They can be eaten alone but most people add them to a salad or even fry them in a little oil and make Empanadas de Diguenes (small pies). 

Sowing seed

Finally, runner beans, broad beans and peas have been sown! As per local tradition, I've been waiting for a full moon - apparently this has an impact on the size of the produce - go figure!

The first bed in the right of the picture has the runner beans; a drainage trough/walk way separates it from the next bed which has the broad beans and peas. Fungicide was used to kill off unwanted worms and the soil was enriched with a furtilizer mix.

'Ulmos' trees in flower

The bright yellow bloom of the Ulmo tree is a sure sign that winter is definitely over, and warm days ahead. In fact it reached 20c today, a perfect day for the '18' Independence of Chile celebrations.

Ready to Lime

The vegetable garden has now been fully dug over and is now ready to lime - being close to a volcano, the soil is quiet acidic! However, it should be ready to start sowing the first crop by the end of September.

Fenced-in

A few weeks ago I made start on digging over the soil in preparation for planting in the coming spring. Our dogs thought this was great and promptly began to contribute to the digging by carving out burrows to lounge in - amongst other things! Ummm my vegetables don't stand a chance; fortunately my friendly neighbor agreed to build this fence for me - I supplied the materials and encouragement ;-) 

Closet in 5 days

Over the weekend I set myself a challenge - fill the space pictured above with a closet by Friday August 26!

I purchased the materials on Monday and began to dimension the interior of the closet on Tuesday. I used the over-head beams as logical divisions for the closet. The closet doors and frame were pre-purchased many years ago - so I hope it fits!

Below is the result as things stand on Friday; I got a bit distracted with other projects like my lattice tower and fencing for the vegetable garden so its not 100% complete, but I'm nevertheless happy with the closet.

Wood Stove Project

A country home is not complete without a wood burning stove! In Chile these stoves are very common and relatively cheap to purchase. The stove we chose came pre-fitted with the copper piping in the combustion chamber to heat water. Below is the plumbing diagram:-

1. Security expansion Valve
2. Hot water exit
3. 150 litre tank
4. Chimney
5. Hot water flow into tank
6. Pre heated return
7. Cold water feed
8. Copper 'Serpentin'
9. Wood Stove


The water tank (point B) should be 50cm above the stove hot water exit (point A) for good circulation.

Given this requirement I positioned the stove next to an exterior wall with easy short access to the expansion tank. An unused kitchen doorway was filled-in to provide a suitable space. I constructed a simple stand to support the tank at the correct height. Then fitted the pipework and plumbed in the hot and cold feeds. Insulating foam was wrapped around the heating loop to and from the stove.

I fitted a 'T' connector and valve in order to drain the system if necessary.

The system was filled and tested for leaks. In takes around 2hrs to heat a tank full of piping hot water - enough for several showers! Once I was satisfied with the functionality of the system, the tank was fully enclosed to protect it and be more visually acceptable :-)

All that is left to do now is to stain the wood enclosure to match the rest of the house.     

Vegetable Garden - Part 1

Approximately 50m2 of turf has been cleared in preparation for our vegetable garden in Pucon. The next step is prepare the soil for the plants and seeds that will be sown in spring.

Ash cloud visible from Pucon

I took this picture Sunday afternoon with my iPhone from the marina in Pucon. I was very surprised to see the plume of ash coming from the eruption of the Puyehue volcano range which began Saturday evening. It was a beautiful afternoon, warm autumn colors, no tourists! 

La Serena - Temuco (1,233km)

First thing Monday, I ran around getting my motorcycle paperwork up-to-date - insurance, road taxes etc ... then had a fantastic lunch at John-Micheal's parents house where my bike was stored :-)

That evening I met up with some of my former group from Gemini at a nice restaurant in town. It was good to see them again. I then returned to Las Tacas to prepare for my ride home.

I had every intention of leaving at the crack of dawn, but that ended up being 09:30! It took me a while to pack up the bike and close-up the apartment, but I felt better for a more relaxed departure.

The road conditions were fair, quite cold and foggy between Las Tacas and Los Vilos. The plus side was there was very little wind which can be quite fierce. Things warmed up when I got closer to Santiago. Traffic was quite heavy through the city center, and practically nobody respects motorcylces so you have to be ultra alert at all times and try and stay out of harms way, which is not easy in heavy multi-lane traffic.

I was glad to clear Santiago, my target was a hotel in Curico which marked approximately the half way point. 600km in one day is a long ride, my upper body was really suffering and to make matters worse it was getting dark and I had another 100km or so to go. The risks rise significantly riding at night, poor visibility and it was getting really cold and foggy again!

I stayed at this hotel during my ride up to La Serena last year, so I knew exactly where is was and was very relieved to get there in one piece. I immediately took a very long hot shower and got an early nights sleep.

Breakfast at 07:30, and I was back on the road again at 08:30 ... another 600km to go. Conditions were much the same cold and foggy. I stopped every 150km or so to refuel and warm-up with hot coffee. Fortunately, I had no problems with the bike - in all a very smooth ride despite the cold.

I reached Temuco around 16:00 - Anita was waiting there for me with hot food on the table ... I was staving. Given that it would get dark soon and limited storage space in our garage at the moment, I decided to leave the bike in Temuco and drove back to Pucon with Anita. Our dogs were pleased to see us :-)   

Tower construction on hold for now ...

View looking north

Winter Wonderland

Winter as arrived!

Empanadas

A couple of weeks ago my mother-in-law showed me how she makes traditional Chilean empanadas. Well I decided to scale down the receipe in order to let my bread machine do all the mixing, and of-course replaced the meat filling with something Anita would find acceptable - I diced some cheese, green peppers, and onion, all bathed in some tomato purée. I'm very please with the result ... The pastry turned out perfect and the filling was tasty :-)

CH update

Finally we have a stable heating system! It turns out that our pellet boiler electronics is very sensitive to any voltage changes. The first indications of abnormal behavior was that it would frequently shut itself down and display an error message (alarm pellet) - which at first made everyone think that it was a configuration problem (52 parameters can be set on this thing).

But in the end, the problem was traced to small dips in voltage every time the water pump or refrigerator kicked in. So I fitted a domestic voltage stabilizer and that seems to have done the trick!

Oh and another leak was discovered last week; which was traced down to a drywall screw that had been driven right into the center of a 3/4" pipe! Fortunately it was fairly easy to repair, I just need to patch the drywall I cut open to expose the leak.

Central Heating Woes :-(

Last week a small puddle appeared in the hallway. Closer inspection confirmed my fear that the water was coming from the heating system distribution pipes. Damm! I had to rip into the wood clad ceiling to fix the problem; fortunately not too much of it had to be removed - just as well as it is pretty difficult to do without causing a lot of damage! Anyway, after locating the leaking joint I semi-drained the heating system in order to re-solder.

Refilled, purged of air and tested - all appears to be OK. I really hope this is the last leak I have to deal with! Oh and of-course I had to fit new wood panels to close up the ceiling and refit the cornice. In all,  2 days to complete.

Tower preparation

The successful resolution of QRM re-kindled my enthusiasm to erect my antenna farm! Here the final section of my lattice tower is being painted. Once installed the tower will stand around 15m; but before I do that I need to add the supporting components in order to fit the antenna rotator.

There's quite a lot of science surrounding optimum antenna performance on HF; higher isn't necessarily better - it really boils down to what you what to achieve, the type of antenna, and the topography of your particular location.

G3TXQ has a detailed explanation on his website http://www.karinya.net/g3txq/hexbeam/height_2/

Quite honestly, 50ft is already scary high for antenna maintenance! .... and according to G3TXQ his study has shown that "if we can get the antenna up around the 40ft-50ft mark we will be within 1dB of the optimum height for short-haul and medium-haul paths on all bands 20m thru 10m. And we will probably accept the "half S point" penalty that our modest height suffers on the long-haul paths" 


- that's good enough for me!   

Hunt for QRM!

Since moving permanently to our country home I have been plagued with very strong S9+ QRM (man made electrical interference) on the HF bands. I've not noticed it before because I previously only operated 2m VHF FM. 

I've been very concerned about this noise since it was making HF operation unbearable with this horrific static. I was worried that the source of the interference may have been coming from a nearby faulty line transformer or perhaps even my neighbor's micro hydro generator! I didn't rate my chances of resolving the problem in either scenario. Who cares that their chinese voltage regulator is spewing RF garbage right? 

Well in a moment of desperation, this evening I decided to start investigating the source. I used my handy Yaesu VX-5 to track down the culprit. To my relief the noise disappeared as I moved away from the house. OK, something inside is generating this horrible noise. Since it was already dark, hitting the main circuit-breaker was not an option without incurring the wrath of my wife and son ;-) so I began eliminating fridges and electrical gadgets one-by-one.

Eventually I found the evil pollutant - a crappy AC/DC adaptor from Taiwan that was providing power to an equally badly shielded GSM box that provides a cellphone circuit to the house alarm system.

What a difference! I can now hear faint signals on all bands! No more QRM :-)

Heating Success!

I purchased the radiators from the same company that supplied the pellet boiler. To be perfectly honest I didn't do any fancy calculations to work out the thermal load of each space/room that I wanted to heat. I just made a reasonable guess based on what I've seen installed in other buildings etc .... Naturally to some extent the radiator size is governed by the physical location, under windows etc ... so I used double panel radiators to ensure that I had enough heating output range - I figure that I can always reduce the flow if the room gets too hot!

So I labored for 7 days, installing all 10 radiators; I had most of the pipework already in place during the initial house construction but I had to make some modifications and additions to accommodate the new location of the boiler and several other radiators - it took me longer than I expected and I'm shocked at how expensive copper is these days! No wonder PVC is now used.

On Tuesday afternoon the heating engineers finally turned up to install and setup the pellet boiler. It took them a day and a half to plumb everything in and setup the system parameters. Then came the moment of truth - to fill the system. Consider the fact that most of the pipe-work was soldered together several years ago and that 90% of the system is no longer easily accessible you can imagine my apprehension and concern for possible leaks! It was also quite late 9:30pm, so even less keen to potentially flood the house!  but the installers were eager to finish the job so I reluctantly agreed to continue.  As the water rushed around the pipes I held my breath and listened for the worst. As the pressure reached 1 bar I began the process of purging the system of air by 'bleeding' each radiator. So far so good! When the boiler reached its operating temperature the circulation pump kicked-in and sent hot water through the system - pisssssshhhhh oh! Water sprayed out of several joints in the laundry - sh#* - part of the pipework that I had modified that day (because the original routing created a potential air trap) had not taken the solder properly - this is what happens when you move/reuse joints; you have to be especially careful to re-join everything with plenty of solder. So the clean-up pretty much killed the rest of the evening.

The next day, the system had to be drained of fluid in order to repair the leaking joints. This took a couple of hours and yet another trip to Villarrica to purchase more anti-freeze. That's one of the downsides to living in the 'campo', you don't have a DIY store around the corner to buy parts. So once again the system was filled, purged of air and brought up to temperature. Success! no visible leaks, but not all the radiators were getting hot. To remedy this, radiators that were hot were closed to increase the flow to those that were cool; after a second round of purging air this did this trick - all 10 radiators were now hot  - fantastic my central heating project is finally complete!

Central Heating Project

This is probably one of the more ambitious projects I've undertaken, especial since I'm not a plumber by trade. Anyway .... the story begins as far back as 2001 when I began to design and install the pipe-work for the heating system. Over the years the house has been slowly finished, but up until now no radiators had been installed since we have mainly occupied the house during the summer months and so the pipework remained unused for many years. But planning ahead, I knew that someday would would live in Pucon on a full-time basis and thus would require central heating.

Originally I expected to use a standard Gas combo boiler (10 years ago when the price of gas was half reasonable); but gas has probably tripled or more in cost today and so I looked around for alternatives. In the end I settled for a pellet boiler due to the very low emissions and cost per KW/hr which works out at about $35 pesos (~$7 cents) at today's prices. I also love the fact that biomass pellets is basically renewable fuel which can even be produced at home from grass and leaves with the purchase of a small pellet mill; and of-course pellets are completely safe and easy to store and handle unlike other heating fuels.

We took delivery of our new 29KW boiler last week. We decided to transport it ourself from Temuco to Pucon to save some cash - but I kind of under-estimated the size and weight of this thing! When the fork-lift dumped the boiler in the back of the truck - which sank considerably (240kg), I soon had a moment of panic thinking how the f$%k am I going to unload this thing back at the house!

Fortunately, we have some good neighbors whom were eager to help. Since no one had a forklift or any way to even use a simple winch, we had to think of some other way to get this beast out of my truck and into the house. Last year we had our entrance/drive way leveled out which just happened to create a level change which matched the height of the rear of my truck which allowed us to slide the boiler out. We (five men) then rolled the boiler over to the house using 3 circular fence posts. It was comical to watch, but effective ... like transporting a tremendous Moai from the stone quarry to its final resting place.

In part 2 I'll describe the installation of the radiators and the Pellet boiler.

Picking Blackberries

Autumn is approaching here in Chile and the blackberries are beginning to ripen. We had a heavy down pour of rain on Friday, so the next day we took advantage of the sunny day to pick blackberries with our son Ethan. It reminded me of when I was a kid picking wild fruit :-)

Our dogs love blackberries!

HF Portable

My portable HF Station set-up on the deck. A Yaesu FT-817 running on internal batteries + Auto turner, fed into a vertical 'Pro Whip' that I picked up last year in England. Propagation was pretty good that evening, with strong signals from Australia and the US.

Country Life

It has been hot all week in Pucon, Thursday was no exception - not a good day for lugging firewood around but we took delivery of a lorry load the night before which they dump at the edge of our property. The ~1.5m logs had to be cut and stored; even with two experienced laborers with a chainsaw, it took us 6 hours to complete the task. I used my truck to ferry the cut wood to our storage area. One thing for sure is that I'm glad I don't do this every day for a living as it is brutal on the back!

Broken Toe to start the New Year!

The new year hasn't exactly started off on the right foot! I don't believe in fate, I know exactly the stupid decision I took that led to snapping my right little toe in two! - That is, it's not a good idea to ride quad bikes with flip-flops - especially off-road :-) At the time it didn't hurt at all; I remember looking down after striking some low vegetation which ripped-off my flip-flop and noticed that my little toe was at a strange angle ... umm that's not good!

But shortly after the pain grew intense and I went into shock. I took a pain-killer and rested a while to recover enough to drive myself to the emergency room. The above x-ray clearly shows the displaced fracture. Actually, the worst part of this experience was the two injections of local anesthetic into my foot - which felt like the needle was being pushed through the bone!

After a few mins the doctor then pushed and tugged my toe to realign the bone - I couldn't watch, I wanted to throw-up at this point! Then to add insult to injury the clinic stung me for $182,000 pesos (~$400 USD) for the treatment - I won't forget that bike ride for a while, but I'm just glad that nothing happened to Anita who was riding 2-up with me.