Mt. Wombat Update

V

VK2RK

Guest
Further information on the Mt. Wombat situation


We have a power outage at Mt Wombat.
We lost mains power DC at around 16:00 yesterday. power distribution switched over to essential(2m,CB,Network).

At the current load i expect that we will trip the minimum battery voltage (11V) sometime this afternoon/evening.

It’s probably the circuit breaker or earth leakage trip. If anyone is heading up there to investigate take a photo of the Hut circuit breakers before reseting, paying attention to get the colour or symbol shown on the RCCB as that will normally tell us if it was leakage or amps.

-Josh

Additionally today looks like there are power crews doing maintenance in the area maybe they were yesterday as well.?
 
J

Josh

Guest
I remotley renabled all services this morning. We had 6m, CB off while the batteries were charging.
 
V

VK3YNV

Guest
Repeater Status Updates/Changes.

We have some unresolved issues with the Mr Wombat repeaters,
The current Motorola 30A power supply is insufficient to run all the repeaters at the same time when the battery capacity is low.
The effect of this is that we need to wait until the batteries are sufficiently recharged after a prolonged power outage, that is now possible with the software changes that Josh has made to the power distribution controller. A better solution would be to upgrade the Motorola Power supply to a higher capacity unit. We should be looking for 60A or better.

So in summary..

1. Need to consider replacing the Motorola units with a higher capacity unit.

2. The DSTAR repeater is not restarting correctly because it's failing to communicate with the ICOM controller.

3. In order to isolate the "crackle problem" I have switched the 2M receive antenna to the spare 3dB colinear rather than the 6dB colinear that we suspect has a problem. The 3dB performs pretty well in the tests done so far, only slightly less than the 6dB.

4. The circuit breaker is a combined RCD and 10A overcurrent unit, and it's impossible to tell what caused the trip, it might just be that 10A is insufficient when we have a power surge when recovering after an outage. If wire sizes allow it, we should up that to a 16A breaker and seperate RCD breaker.

Also the old switchboard with the ceramic fuses should be replaced and surge protection installed along with resettable circuit breakers.

Ray VK3YNV
 
J

Josh

Guest
Another outage. We are currently running only the 2m on backup power, I'll restore other services after power returns and the battery looks like it has enough charge.

Ausnet outage details:
Outage Details - Planned Outage
A planned outage is a scheduled interruption to power supply to allow crews to gain safe access for maintenance and construction purposes.

Reference: INCD-23682-c
Cause: Critical Maintenance
Status: In Progress
Start Time: 08:45AM 27/10/2021
Est time to restore: 04:30PM 28/10/2021
 
J

Josh

Guest
I've just restored IRLP for that net tonight.
I'll have to shut it down after the net.
 
J

Josh

Guest
Power has been restored, 2m and IRLP online, other services to resume latter tonight once there is a bit more charge in the batteries.
 
J

Josh

Guest
welp that did not last long. power was lost again at 5:20 this morning, it came back on shorty and then was lost again.
 
J

Josh

Guest
and we have mains power again.
2m and IRLP back up.
other services to follow in the next hour or so.
 
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