We all set our clocks forward (or, more likely, had our clocks "mysteriously" set themselves forward) today, and eastern Massachusetts is back in the the timezone that it probably should be year-round, and I find myself wondering whether the Iron Blogger script is going to get the right local time. "Hopefully, I won't be testing this." Anyway...
I alluded to some in-progress ham-radio stuff. Most of you know what the Green building is (and if you don't, well, follow the link to the Wikipedia) and that it is not, in most relevant ways, green. You probably know (now, at least, that is it has a large golfballish structure on the top):
That structure is a radome, housing an 18 foot dish that was used for an experimental weather radar between when the building was built in the sixties until the early nineties. The dish uses a pedestal az-el mount adapted from a SCR-584 radar, which was developed at the Rad Lab at MIT during World War II. (Yes, I considered making those Wikipedia links as well. No, I don't feel too good about it.) Anyway:
We changed the oil in the mount Friday night. One of the oil reservoirs looked remarkably clean-but-old. The other... looked kind of greenish, which is odd because the MP-61 pedestal doesn't have a coolant system. Regardless, it now squeaks less, but unfortunately it still squeaks. Apparently the bearings were designed to be greased at the factory and not subsequently serviced... I don't think they were thinking that they'd last for sixty years. More to come.
