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Sweet Success

Elias flew in today. I went down to the airport with our car and driver to pick him up. As soon as we got back, we started the feed horn assembly. As we put the cable ends on, we didn't have directions, and I was really unsure about the quality of the job we were doing. As we started the pointing, we got no signal at all. So Leif and I checked the cables with a multimeter, and they seemed to be good. We still got nothing, so we tried a cell phone call to Dave Pedersen at the MAF office a few times. Still nothing, and around 2 PM, we really weren't sure what to do next.

I sat down in the tent, and paged through the back of the manual for the satellite modem, I saw that we had indeed not properly put the connectors on the coax cable. We re-did all four cable ends, and that took quite a long time, as it was a slow and tedious job to get it done right. Soon after 4 PM we had the dish pointed, and had a signal that was really good. At that point it was time to call the NOC in North Carolina. In order to finish the set-up, they would need to communicate with the earth station in Germany. However, that station was down for some routine maintenance. They scheduled an appointment for us at midnight our time.

Elias and I watched a movie together, anxiously awaiting midnight. We didn't receive the call when we were supposed to, and finally called them to find out what was going on. Soon after we were on a call to North Carolina and Germany, and we were working on final configurations to the setup. It went very smoothly, and by 1:30 AM we were downloading e-mails and chatting with people at the MAF office in Redlands. Finally, it was operational. What good news. We stopped and took a few minutes to praise and thank the Lord for what was accomplished. Then Elias and I stayed up 'til 4:30 AM, catching up on e-mail, updating our computers, sending a few photos of us to the Redlands office, participating in a conference call to the satellite internet provider's CEO who was in a meeting. We were too excited to sleep!