Arriving in Hile, and also having been in Dhankuta, we faced a rather interesting challenge to begin with. The GPS coordinate had been wrong before and there was no way there was going to be a link between the two. 70 meters off may not seem like a lot, but when that 70 meters is straight down the hill.... I think you get the problem.
That's when it became time to become creative, so we started looking and found that we could probably get a link up to the Namje tower we'd repaired before. Repointing one of the patch antenna's there (spread of 18 degrees) should fix the problem. The azimuth of Hile was only 10 degrees off from Dhankuta so pointing the patch at Namje a few degrees off from Dhankuta, which shouldn't harm that link, would get us a solid signal at Hile.
After some experiments, while also setting up all the things such as batteries, cabling, lightning arrestor and what not inside, we found that we could indeed see the Namje tower. The signal wasn't great yet, but then we still had to adjust the antenna there. So quite a succesfull bit of improvisation.
And who knows, when we go back to Namje to repoint the antenna we'll probably get internet up and running for the soldiers guarding our tower there as well.
Obviously a lot of other things happened today as well. We decided (definetly) not to use the chargers from India anymore since they, to put it gently, suck. Using the invertors charge function seems to function far better. Bamboo poles may look good but bend just slightly too much for radio's. Getting nails is easy, finding a wall that doesn't crack when you put them in isn't...
A lot of small details that just made the day worthwhile. And of course the good knowledge that both the Hile and Dankuta center are virtually up and running. That makes 6 centers by now.
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