BYUTV Back On-The-Air

I guess we were both "Voted off the Island" this past week.  Both of us needed a little time with the other senior missionaries in Upolu, and lucky for us it corresponded well with a planned trip to work on the BYUTV broadcast equipment on the other island.

 The over-the-air broadcast of BYUTV has not been working for the past two months so there were two engineers flying in from Provo and a contractor coming from Brisbane to work on it.  Since I had done some troubleshooting on the problem, they wanted me to join them. A request with which we were very happy to comply.  So, on Tuesday, after a last minute trip to the Post office to pick up the last box of equipment they had sent for the trip, We flew from Pago Pago and met Brandon Smith and Mike Grover.  Mike lives in NSL and knows many of our friends on Cobblecreek.  Brandon knows my brother Ken from when he drove for BYU.

I spent my time with the ICS and BYU engineers and Shanna worked with the office couple to resolve some of the issues we have with getting missionaries into the USA legally.  Oh, she also went shopping and out to lunch with some of the other sisters.

The BYUTV signal is picked-up by a satellite dish located behind the temple and then broadcast on channel 44 toward the mountains.  Our antennae on the mountain pick-up the signal and then re-broadcasts it on channel 48 to most of the island.  We had to re-align the satellite dish, change out the satellite signal receiver/decoder, change the transmitted and re-transmitted channel frequencies and talk and laugh a bunch.  Actually we took care of the talk and laugh part and the engineer from Australia did most of the work.  I figured they got what they payed for.

We spent most of Friday at the tower on top of the mountain so a couple of us climbed up and checked on the antennas.  It was a pretty clear day so I got a few pictures.  The picture above with the red dot is Shanna standing in the road in front of our Upolu summer house.

I took the photo below to show a little of our world in Upolu.  The satellite dish is just above the "U" in the BYUTV label and the antenna that sends it up the mountain is on the building above the "L" in the Pesega School label.  Our office is located in the Service Center just under the "C".

On Friday evening all of the senior couples had dinner at Aggie Gray's Resort to say good-bye to the Jacobs as they were leaving the next morning.  The Jacobs have children in China so they're traveling West before returning to King City, California.

On Saturday 12 of the seniors and the two BYU engineers went snorkeling at the marine preserve on the far side of the island.  Brandon saw a large turtle but I didn't get a picture; the stationery clams were much easier to photograph.  I was very amazed at the beautiful colors of the clams and how large they are.  The biggest are about three feet long and about one and a half wide when they are open.