Crunch Time

We get maybe 60-90 minutes of work time in the late afternoon (more if I'm not busy; less if, like today, I'm still working on something that needs to be in people's hands when they come to work in Chicago tomorrow morning). Today's job was to attempt to put a new pilot string through the conduit from the antenna tower, and then use that to drag a new coax cable through the conduit. The first step went okay, but when we started pulling the coax through, it got hung up. We tried dragging it the other way through the conduit, and it got stuck at roughly the same place. Lisa's conclusion: the conduit has cracked and partially collapsed. The very thin pilot string is still getting through, but anything bigger is getting caught up in the partially-collapsed conduit. A contributing factor is that the original conduit was apparently not heavy enough grade plastic in the first place.

Lisa says the only real solution here is to dig up the conduit (about eight meters or so between the buildings), pull out all of the cables (there are six of them in there already), and lay a new, stronger conduit. Unfortunately, we probably are not going to have the time to do this during this trip. On Friday I have to take her to Portland and I leave on Saturday afternoon, and furthermore, it's supposed to start raining again tomorrow afternoon. Maybe if we'd started at the beginning of the trip, but not now. It's going to have to wait until later.