How I Spent My Monday

July 6, 2010

Monday, July 5, 2010. My 16th anniversary with the Tulare County Sheriff’s Department as a 9-1-1 dispatcher. I’m just wrapping up a vacation, so I didn’t have to spend it at work! I ended up spending most of it on the top of a hot, dusty hilltop in Kings County, assisting Ted install a wireless link.

I’m in full Okie mode here – funky sun hat, khaki green Tshirt from the Sheriff’s Department, and peeling paint on my old Ford pickup truck. All I need now is a can of beer! Pepsi had to do, however, since I don’t drink. And I’m not really an Okie, but it’s my family heritage. Gotta keep up the traditions as best I can, you know.

Here are some more pictures of the day.

We got up to the site early, I left Visalia shortly after 7am. For those of you that know me, that’s 0:dark thirty in the morning, a gawd-awful time of the day! I managed, however. 70 miles later, we were at the top of the hill, and the heat was already on! We quickly set to work, hoping to finish before the heat really set in.

Here’s a shot of me, testing out the Transition lenses in my (relatively) new glasses. They worked! It was bright up there. Maybe because we were closer to the sun? 😉

Ted is putting the pieces of the microwave dish together. Isn’t he a hottie??

Now installing the dish on the top of the mast. He’s about 15 feet up, and the wind is blowing pretty steadily. It doesn’t look all that high here, but I climbed up there and believe me, it’s high enough!

Aiming the dish. It has to hit a point 38 miles away, and it has to be exact. It’s like invisible laser beams, and the pointing has to be right on, or it doesn’t work.

The big dish is the back-haul that points at another dish along Highway 99, and then on to Fresno. The tall rectangular boxes are antennas to feed to end users in the area, and the new dish on top, pointing to Alpaugh.

Some other antennas at the site. Several other organizations use the site for radio repeaters.

Coalinga is out there somewhere, in the heat and the haze. Remember, Coalinga is the place that took a lot of damage from that earthquake. It leveled a lot of the downtown in the 80’s.

Looking west from the hilltop. Those strata show extensive deformation of the ground by geological forces over the eons. The San Andreas Fault is only a few miles further west.