The last village up the mountain

Lutheran Church

Our temporally home in the mountain village:

Way up Mt. Bondwa 

Heading right into the clounds

Pulling the heavy transmitter cable up the tower:

Fixing the receiving Antenna temporally with wire:

The temporally transmitting antenna:

The small SYI transmitter on 20 Watts output:

The great fiew over the Mikumi National Park

Tower of Radio Maria 15km towards Dodoma

We are very grateful it had been possible to get a electricity meter after the director followed it up again on May 25th. The Problem was the hard way up the Mt. Bondwa during the rainy season.
So we could drive to Morogoro on 5th of June. As usual we got accomodation in the ELCT Junior seminary.
We managed to drive up to the last village. However the last part of the steep road had been washed out by the rains badly, that the car slipped from one ditch to the other.

In the village we left the car right under the Lutheran church. We found people to guard the car and to help us carrying the transmitter up the mountain.

The way up first leads along the old Morning sight house, then fields until you reach the rain measure gauge at the old generator house of the TTCL. From here the way passes through the rain forrest up to the peak. Usually you find heavy fog in the rain forrest, the clouds hanging between the trees! But where you find a whole in the clouds you may have a very nice fiew far to the North!

It took us 4 hours to get up to the peak from the last village.

The first day we managed to pull the heavy transmitter cables from the transmission room up the antenna mast.

On the second day it had been possible to place the receiving antenna, the telemetry antenna, and the temporally transmitting antenna on place.

We also could connect all the cables to the transmitter.

It took us about 3 years from the planning stage until the transmitter was up there, because we had to get the licence and frequency assignment from the TCRA in Dar Es Salaam first, then we had to find a sponsor for the transmitter, we had to order the transmitter from the USA, get electricity etc...

Unfortunately more strong stations had been added on this site and around Morogoro, which makes ball reception very difficult up there. We need to feed our transmitter with the signal coming from Mt.Seguruma/Usambara on 102.6 MHz or Kibaya on 102.9MHz. But we found Radio Maria operating on 102.0 MHz. It is right in the reciving direction in only 15km!

So we have to find another better option now feeding the programmes to the transmitter.

The second problem is: The high voltage transformer is too small for so many high power stations. That is why we got permission to use just 50 Watts input power, while the other stations run on 1.2kW. Hopefully the electricity company will succeed to bring up additional high voltage transformers to make more power available there.

We are working on the new transmitting antenna already. We prepared 4 stacked 3 element yagies towards East and another 4 to cover as far as possible towards West.

We are still needing fittings and cables to prepare teh power splitters for all the antennas. Those are shipped already and will be there end of this year.

We finished installation shortli before sunset and had to head down the way in the dark. Fortunately there was a small torch in the backpack...