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Well, we did it.

Well, we did it. Went to the repeater today. We had a bit of a slow start out of the hangar, and it was 9:15 AM when we started up the trail. Bruce told me it would take between an hour and twenty minutes to two hours to reach the spot he pointed out to me. I couldn't believe it would take that long, as it didn't look that far. An hour and forty-one minutes later, after slogging our way up a muddy trail, we reached the repeater site. It was a cloudy day, and that helped keep things cool. But I still sweated a ton. The humidity was high. The bugs were bad on the top, even worse than at the south repeater which is farther out into the jungle. I never see mosquitos in Shell, but there were some really big ones up there. The elevation was 5715' where we were working. After we ate an early lunch we got to work. I cleaned the ten solar panels. They were very dirty. I didn't have much water to work with, and when I was done there was still some soap on the panels and on my hands. It didn't take long for the rain to come along and finish the job of rinsing the panels. Robert used a meter to check the solar panels and make sure they were all working. We found one that wasn't, and it was repaired skillfully by Bruce.

We also took one of the repeaters out and brought it back with us. It will be reconfigured and we'll take it to the south repeater in January. By the way, the repeaters are used for the VHF radios, which are line of site. Using the repeater allows us to communicate longer distances. The north repeater isn't used a whole lot by MAF, but the HCJB hospital in Shell does use it quite a bit. Our contacts with the jungle villages takes place through the south repeater.

I think we left sometime around 3:30. The trip down was very tricky, as the rain had made the trail slippery. Add that to the steepness of the trail, and it was difficult to stay on our feet in many places. We were back in the hangar by 5:15 with our mission successfully accomplished.