Dedication

The epic saga of the cables continues. Despite the sheer number and length of them, courage and perseverance within the team remains high. The quote that sums this up best was when one determined worker stated: "I will get these cables sorted out, even if I have to stay here until midnight!".

Yet another seemingly impenetrable mass of HBA cables.


Izabela Bukowska who, true to her word, was still at the Observatory at midnight.

Disentanglement

One of the consequences of various tasks being ahead or behind the schedule is that the folks at Chilbolton have been forced to deploy all the HBA cables before the RF-Container was ready to accept them. This has been good in that they have been able to get the cables laid into the trenches without incurring further delays. On the other hand, they now need to sort out these cables to feed them in the correct order into the RF-container. Quite a task as you will see!

A bundle of cables... thankfully all electronically labelled. A barcode reader and some home-built software will quickly identify the antenna position associated with each cable.


Stuart Lynn, (our "All in the Gutter" live tweeter) Izabela Bukowska and Cristina Fernandes trace a cable in preparation for its deployment into the final trench to the RF-container.


The first cable pair reach the patch panel (Y & X polarisations for HBA antenna #95).


Alejo Martinez-Sansigre, Dave King and Mike Willis continue work on patching cables into the RF-container


Some more of the day's cable-team (left-to-right): Roger Deane, Cristina Fernandes, Alejo Martinez-Sansigre and Stuart Lynn.