News from Vanuatu

[IK0ZCW]

Hi all,

Just got a very welcome phone call from Rod YJ8RN; he and the family are OK :-)

Typically, he is racing around town fixing generators for people but took the time to stop when he got some coverage and called me. Just the same old Rod – I couldn’t get a word in!!

80% of the power is off and some HV feeders are lying on the ground.

Their house is intact but with one of the big coconut trees on the roof. Lost his water tank (out of another tree) but it wasn’t damaged and is now back up and so they have water and power (from his generator).

VBTC is completely off the air so he is resurrecting the 80m Broadcast transmitter again to get some news out around the islands (he didn’t know about the curfew until I told him!) 3945kHz once he gets it up and running again. He has to jury rig the linears but I am sure he’ll get it going! One has tired tubes and the other won’t tune up on 80m so he is going to build one out of the two. The local 96FM station tower fell down which also carried his ISP link so won’t have email for a while however he has taken his laptop to town and can email. He’s going to send me some photos.

It was great to hear from him, he was in mid-stream when the connection broke which I guess is to be expected. I’ll keep you updated if I hear more, no news about how the rest of Mele fared yet.

Cheers,
Geoff, ZL3GA