Antenna Tower Project Completed

On April 15, our guys finished up the first phase of a multi-year project replacing all the cross braces on all four of our antenna towers. Phase two will involve the double braces on the towers.

They've been working at this since 2009, as far as I can remember. The old cross braces were rusting out, so the new braces are thicker and have more galvanizing on them.

Here is a picture of some of the first batch of replacement parts and paint that were delivered in back in 2009, and of some of the old cross braces that were just replaced this year.




Each year, we received an additional shipment of parts and paint like the one pictured above.

New Version of the LMC

I just did some more work on my picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud dwarf galaxy as seen over Red Slave on January 30.  I tend to think of all of my astronomy images as "works in progress."  I frequently go back to the original raw files and try out new processing techniques.

 

There are a couple more things i want to do with this image, but it is cool enough now that i made a version to use as desktop wallpaper.  This version is somewhat smaller.

 

That night, with my naked eye, i could just barely barely detect that there was a slight glow in the sky where the LMC was supposed to be located.  A three minute exposure with the camera pulled in a lot more photons and made the LMC pop.

 

Here is a link to my original post, back on Jan. 30.

Did you know that even if you can't hear our gospel programs on the air from TWR Bonaire, you can probably find them online at TWR360! There is audio and video from 126 ministries, in 42 languages on TWR360. Check out www.twr360.com today. There are also twr360 apps for your Android or iOS devices.

A new improved version of the TWR360 Web site went live earlier this year. Be sure to check it out if you haven't visited lately. Updated apps are also in the works.

TWR360 Video Network is now on Roku! If you have a Roku device, TWR360 is now available to you as a streaming app on that platform. More than 1000 Roku users downloaded the TWR360 Roku app during the first month.

Here are the top 10 countries, in descending order, visiting TWR360 from a Web browser in March: Brazil, Russia, India, USA, Indonesia, Ukraine, Vietnam, Sudan, Kenya and Mexico.


Here are the top 10 countries, in descending order, visiting TWR360 in March, using one of the apps: USA, India, Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Russia.

Iggy Iguana Visits TWR

We beam programming in the Portuguese language to the Amazon region of Brazil each morning from 3am to 5am. These radio programs come to us in real time from the São Paulo office on Brasilsat.

Pictured behind Iggy is the Andrews 4.6m dish that we use to receive the Brazil feed. The tower in the background is a small piece of the original antenna tower that was erected at the transmitter site back in 1964. It now supports STL antennas that point South to the AM transmitter site, and North to the FM transmitter site.