Nautel NV20 Updates and Maintenance

As promised, I will give you an account of our Nautel NV20 maintenance.  All is routine and a pretty boring read, but you always have to be prepared for the unexpected.  Having the first ones does make for some interesting servicing and surprises.  All in all, the maintenance was complete within two hours.

The first part of the process was to upload the new 2.7 software to the “20kW Linux computers.”  No surprises here, so there isn’t much to report there.
The second part of our maintenance before apply the software was to remove a power module and place a ferrite on a fan lead which was reporting the wrong speed.  The tachometer was reporting varying speeds due to RF getting into the circuit.  Of course this only shows up while in hybrid, FM+HD, mode.  In FM only the problem went away, so we knew something was up.  Removal of the module was a breeze.  After taking the cover off, it was easy to clip the ferrite around the lead.  We also took note of how the power amps were installed and then we turned the unit over and removed the back panel.  All heat sink.  I must say the power modules are built very simple and neat.  If you wonder why they are so big it is all heat dissipation from what I can tell.  The components themselves are compact and cleanly installed.  Once the ferrite was in we put it all back together and tested to make sure this took care of our reporting error.  It sure did.  We have extra ferrites if we see this problem crop up in any other modules.
Third we proceeded with the software updates.  The first NV was flawless.  At the end of the update we performed the recalibration procedure with no issue.  The second update took with no issues. After recalibration the thing would not go over 5kW!  Whoa, boy.  What the…?  Identical boxes and one was not happy?  After some checks and comparisons with the first box we checked the threshold settings.  Sure enough the update reset the default thresholds.  After adjusting to what they should be we were back in business.
Fourth, we had some housekeeping to do.  As these are the first ones out there was some test files and configurations that did not get removed causing a bit of network traffice, though not much, was not necessary.  So we eliminated the file and cleared that up.

We are now working smoothly.  All this “work” took less than two hours.  Now if we can get AT&T to maintain the T1’s we will be golden.  We keep pushing them to install fiber.  We continue to wait and call in trouble as we get it.