Seasons are a funny thing down here. We have no spring or autumn, our summer is short and our winter is long. Unlike the UK, the seasons arent dictated by dates or changes in weather – we have 2 factors that determine which season we’re in; the sun and the ship … in that order for summer, and the other way round for winter.
The summer starts when the Sun decides it doesnt want to go away for a while. The base, which normally supports 16 people over winter is readied for the arrival of the ship, which brings food, fuel and 60 eager people. The day the ship arrives sparks Summer Proper, and the chaos of relief ensues – everyone helps brining supplies from the ship to the base which usually takes 7 days of nonstop, 24hour, 12 hour shifts of work. The ship tries to get in a few days before Christmas, but this year we were held up in the ice for 10 days so we arrived at base on the 1st of January.
The majority of people brought on the ship are the summer staff. Experts in their particular field, the base’s population is swollen with erectors, electricians, engineers, builders, mechanics, plumbers, carpenters and a myriad of other industrial types. These lot are responsible for the heavy duty work that’s required over the summer period – raising masts and buildings, building sledges, testing vehicles, moving the garage and drewry (summer accommodation), digging holes and filling them up again. They work hard, very hard. The summer staff are busy until mid Feb, when the ship returns and takes them home to warmer climes. Last year’s winterer’s also leave with the ship, either having done two years or staying for just the one.
This leaves us, the winterering team alone. 18 people of different backgrounds, ages, likes and dislikes – but with one major thing in common. We’re all crazy, and want to live in the most inhospitable place on the planet. We drove the few remaining summerers to the ship on Saturday in 4 sno-cats, helped them to load their gear onboard and said our heartfelt goodbyes. As we lined up on the coast waving at a ship full of happy people waving back, we let off a load of expired flares, and as the bangs, whistles and fizzes echoed around, I felt a sudden realisation of where I was, and what I was about to do.
I was going to spend the next 10 months of my life with the people around me, and we were on our own. Not only would I be working with them, but I’d be living with them, eating with them, having fun with them and no doubt arguing with them. Luckily for me, and I say this with as much honesty as I can possibly convey – I was so happy at that exact moment, I’m with such a solid and wonderful group of people. I dont know what I’ve done to deserve such an opportunity.
Once the ship disappeared into the fog, the 10 of us jumped into our sno-cats, started them up and drove the bumpy flagline to Halley. We chatted and talked over the radio, and as the flags passed by one by one, we were slowly but surely getting closer to home.
The gradual onset of winter is accompanied by fantastic fog and spectacular light. I stood outside watching a fight between the base and the cloaking embrace of an unstoppable fog. The fog won, and it slowly but surely concealed the base in an umbrella of confused cloud, temporarily displacing Halley into a vaporous nebula.
The base at ground level is nondescript and uneventful; you cant see very far at all. Climb a few steps into the clear blue sky however, and the view takes your breath away, and the shelf’s glory is unveiled. It’s even better at -20, the fog takes on a new personality and blankets everything in large ice crystals; doors, cameras, stairs, skidoos, ropes, noses etc – delicately assembling ice structures and sculptures on whatever angles it can find.
I watched a sunset last night. Big deal right? Well I havent seen a sunset for nine weeks, so excuse the enthusiasm and LEAVE ME ALONE, I HATE YOU. I stood outside in the bitter cold, helping Tamsin unravel her twisted kite, with other kiters behind and a setting Sun in front, slowly being swallowed by the never ending horizon. The Sun disappeared from sight at around 22:55, and we were told it would be down for 20 minutes – so we waited. And waited and waited. One seemingly never ending hour later a spot of light shone at the horizon, I readied my camera for the first beam … but nothing. The Sun actually went back down, and it turns out we were looking at a mirage, what a rubbish Sun.
After another 4-5 false alarms of the so called sunrise, we were starting to wonder if the Sun was broken or something. We’d geta spot of light, a slight disc forming above the horizon and then it’d bugger off again. I stood outside in 15knot winds and in -15 temperatures with Blue-toed-Sune, who was fully prepared for the cold by wearing SANDALS and exposing his stupid toes also witnessed this pathetic attempt at a sunrise. Ol’Bluetoes is the guy taking us out on field trips by the way … I’m not worried. Nope, not in the slightest…
Despite the rubbish false starts, the Sun’s eventual arrival (around 12:30am) was definitely worth the wait. Unfortunately, the battery on my camera was completely flat by then, so I failed to capture the glory of the actual moment-of-sunrise itself … so I’ve drawn a picture of the shelf without a Sun.
Being a Manager of Comms, all kinds of fantastic equipment falls under my domain. The everyday stuff seems boring – servers, pcs, laptops, printers etc, the other areas however, might not be exciting, but they’re definitely not the usual run of the mill IT equipment.
First up are the radios. We use VHF (Very High Frequency) for close quarters communications (within 15kms of the base) using little handsets, imagine walkie-talkies and you get the idea. I’ve got about 30 out at the moment, with summer and winter staff alike all chatting away on channel 6. These are absolutely fine for comms in the base, and for parties travelling within the immediate area.
For further distances we have HF (High Frequency), utilising large masts here at Halley to send the transmissions potentially world-wide. We use this to contact field parties further erm, afield, to contact our aircraft during flight following and to contact the other bases. Field parties take smaller portable HF radios and deploy their little antennas outside the tents, and schedule daily checks with the base. Aircraft report in every 30 minutes with position, altitude and time of next call – all vital to ensure safety and more importantly, to keep me busy.
If these fail, and they often do due to ranges too great for VHF and atmospheric situations making HF too noisy, then we have 3 satellite systems to fall back on. First up is the Iridium, a network of fast-moving and low-orbiting polar satellites (800 miles up and go from pole to pole, and not around the equator). The handsets for Iridium are like old-fashioned mobile phones, and they virtually work the same. You turn it on, wait for a signal and dial away, the voice quality isnt fantastic but its more than adequate for comms.
Next up is the Saturn B, or SatB for lazy comms managers. This dish lives in a small dome on top of the roof, and connects in to a geo-stationary satellite 36,000 kms above the equator, which then routes the calls to a land station somewhere in England. SatB was the main form of communication at the base for years, until its bigger brother arrived …. the VSAT.
This monster is our main system with communicating with the outside world. Our internet and main phone lines use this mighty 284k connection, and the 3.7m dish enclosed in a massive dome uses a very narrow beam with lots of power, connecting to NSS7, a geo-stationary satellite. The speed is roughly half of the default broadband speed in the UK, and our VOIP ‘phone lines’ all squeeze into a beam 0.8degrees wide (compared with 16 degrees for SatB) – all very interesting technical specs I’m sure you’ll agree. The VSAT, or Codis as its known down here has to be moved annually, which is a major project for the comms team – and can cause a lot of hassle if the connection isnt restored quickly (imagine no internet, email or phone calls … omg).
Everything has to be raised at Halley, its a pain in the arse. Buildings, antennas, drums, voices, CODIS DOMES. We have about 2m of snowfall each year, and seeing as it doesnt melt, it just builds up, and eventually everything gets buried, and you get used to everything living in a hole. The buildings are all on legs, and each year they’re all literally jacked up a few metres at a time. The antennas are extended by attaching new sections to the top, and the drums, containers, vehicles etc are all placed on a small mounds of snow about 2m high. The Codis dome presents an interesting problem however, seeing as it’s plugged in and powered up at all times, moving it requires more finesse.
In theory its simple; turn everything off, disconnect it, drag the dome from its hole, build up a new mound, drag it back, reconnect it and turn it back on – Voila! Unfortunately, its not that simple .. well the turning it back on part isnt anyways. The disconnecting it, dragging it out, building a new mound is easy and only takes a few hours … it’s the turning it back on and re-establishing the link that causes headaches, hassles and stress induced violence. It took 6 days to re-establish the connection last summer, and I wasnt looking forward to spending any more than 20 mins trying it this year.
The problem stems from the fact that satellites are pretty small when they’re 36,000 miles away. The satellite dish itself knows the approx location of this satellite, but it has no idea of where it is, so as a result it doesnt know where to look. You can tell it the lat/long, but it doesnt know if its pointing north of south, so the ‘address’ for NSS7 should be 6degrees of magnetic north and an elevation of 4 degrees is totally irrelevant if the dome itself is pointing at 300 degrees and on a hill, slanting at 10 degrees. It’s difficult to explain, so I made a drawing!
Before moving the dome, I marked off the positions of the azimuth (left /right) and elevation (up/down), which were pointing at 6degrees azimuth, 4 degrees elevation and got ready for headache time. Ben moved the dome in no time, and had it sat on a mound within a few hours … now it was down to The Super Comms Team to sort it aaaaaahhhht. We hooked up a spectrum analyser to the satellite receiver and started sweeping the skies in the approximate area of the the satellite … or so we thought! Maybe sweeping isnt the right term, painfully looking for a certain signal on the spec analyser while moving the dish a few hundredths … A FEW GODAMN HUNDREDTHS of a degree at a time is more accurate. The dome resets the actual values of azimuth and elevation when you turn it on – a fantastic feature there mister design fellas, nice one. So we looked in the dome, lined up the dish as best we could, looked at the outside of the dome to gauge how much it had moved in azimuth and elevation and worked out that the rough numbers should be 340az and 40el – and started sweeping 10 degrees left and right of 340 at an incredibly slow pace, and increasing the elevation 0.2 degrees each turn … so 330-350 and 40-45 was going to be my home for the next few days
10 hours later and we’re still no closer to finding the satellite. I popped into the dome and noticed that we were on stream1, and remembering that stream1 was dodgy last season, I swapped it over to stream2 and started again … with no immediate luck. It was getting late, and Terry, after sitting at the rack for 4 hours straight looking for the satellite decided to retire at midnight, but myself and Dave carried on looking, determined to break last years record of 6 days searching.
340.10 … 340.15 … 340.21 …. 340.26 etc. I wasnt sure the end values Terry was using, so I swept over to 4 degrees, and thought I’d check out just how low we could get the elevation (I remembered that the previous position was about 6 degrees up from from the dish’s most lowest setting). Expecting the elevation to stop at around 34, I was surprised it carried on dropping … all the way to 6 degrees, when I SPOTTED THE DAMN SATELLITE ON THE SPEC ANALYSER OMG OMG ITS LOCKED ON WE’VE FOUND IT OMG YES GET THE DRINKS IN.
Jammy isnt even close to it, not only were we on the wrong stream for most of the day, but we were looking at the wrong piece of sky too – we never would’ve found it.
All in all it was down for 15 hours, slightly better than the 6 days last year. I took a stop-motion capture of the dome itself … check it out.
A word of warning. It’s not very interesting, unless you’re down here. Or something.
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