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Doing failure analysis on some old and very expensive electrical components. Management thinks I'm joking with root cause being solar flares.... Almost got laughed out of the room until I provided historical data from NASA that had top active days line up exactly with failures. May 6th 2019 we blew a hole in a $70k transformer, turns out that was the most solar active day in 2019.
Oh and yeah, sometimes I start my emails with "bro".
Transformer with said hole.
When people ask me what I do for a living I tell them stories like this and make them guess.
Doing failure analysis on some old and very expensive electrical components. Management thinks I'm joking with root cause being solar flares.... Almost got laughed out of the room until I provided historical data from NASA that had top active days line up exactly with failures. May 6th 2019 we blew a hole in a $70k transformer, turns out that was the most solar active day in 2019.
Oh and yeah, sometimes I start my emails with "bro".
Transformer with said hole.
When people ask me what I do for a living I tell them stories like this and make them guess.
Does it help to Faraday Cage that stuff for something like a solar flare?
As part of the 5G rollout, the folks who have paid the FCC a large number of money in the spectrum auction are also on the hook to provide and install filters on literally every single registered C-band earth station antenna in North America in order to ensure that they don't cause interference with us.
And there are a lot of them.
I have a hard time comprehending that amount of moneys, but apparently someone else has. The sub-contractor of their sub-contractor's sub-contractor is due to show up at my place the week of Aug 8.
I'm not sure they know what they're in for.
Most of the dishes that they have to deal with look like these:
That's the ground-level sat farm at my place, dishes 1 through 12, excepting #2. You can easily reach the southwest dishes with a bucket truck, the east and north dishes involve dual 16' A-frame ladders and an extension ladder. No biggie, we keep these in the yard.
But this is where it gets fun.
Here is my dish #2:
No optical illusions happening here. The focal point of that bitch is about even with the roofline of the 2nd floor.
No one has ever climbed into that dish since it was first erected, and that was about 15 years before I started working here.
Yes, it's that reliable.
Also, that's a network uplink dish. It's pumping power upwards to the Galaxy 30 (formerly Galaxy 14) satellite 24/7, so unless you've already had all of the children you might ever want to have, you need to pre-coordinate with us so we can hand off to the backup uplink in Indianapolis before you climb this one.
I've sent these photos (and more), along with detailed information on how to (not) access the site with conventional lift-gear, to the contractor.
Haven't heard back from them yet.
I assume that the word "****" will be a part of the conversation.
Last edited by Joe Perez; Jul 24, 2021 at 12:17 PM.
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