Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles Trip -- August 25-28, 2004
Here are some pictures from my recent trip to a Carribean Island that is a
scuba diver's paradise. I only had time to get wet in the shower. The red
arrow marks the location of Bonaire. The other Dutch islands of Curacao and Aruba
complete the island group. Luis, you are on this map as we can all see the Dominican
Republic is just above the Caribbean Sea. The map comes from a CIA web site. I
added the RED ARROW. The southern half of Florida is clearly visible at the top of
the map.
The two satellite dishes in the upper LEFT quadrant of this photo are the ones at
Flamingo TV, which is where I worked during the trip. This picture came off the web,
but it appears to be taken from a docked cruise ship that may have been anchored in the
harbor. For more pictures of Bonaire, use this web
link to Google.
Since I have been working in the Cable Television and Satellite Communcations
insdustry since 1971, my work there was with the local cable network, Flamingo TV.
And since all cable systems begin at the headend, here are the racks in their headend.
Before any testing can begin, all the signals leaving the headend must be set
to the correct levels. You can see my balding head in the center of this photo along
with two of the Flamingo TV employees. That is Marciano Silberie in the blue shirt
and Timothy Halley nearest the camera.
This is the view from the front of their office property showing the very large
satellite antennas that assure quality signals to the system.
And here is why we are standing here, a splice block in the cable will have to
be removed in favor of a straight cable splice.
With the noon hour approaching, our main contact took us to lunch in town while
the crew worked to update the cable splice above. Here is where we had our lunch.
No matter what you think about the name of the restaurant, they did not serve
Italian food, but what they had was really good!
Here is a view of the street beyond the restaurant. The name of the town
is Kralendijk. You can learn
more about the island of Bonaire here. There are other sites about Bonaire that
you can find with a Google search, the link above is just one that I picked for this page.
OK, back to work. After the splice was replaced, the cable in front of
the headend looked like this. There is also an old abandoned smaller cable.
Now that the cable is "fixed", let's go down to the first amplifier location southbound and see what we have for signal levels. To do that, we go to a new page for you guys using dialup internet access.