Leftless
Race Dog
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2006
- Messages
- 561
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Western Cape
- Bike
- Honda CRF-1000L Africa Twin
I’m riding way too little and working way too much…
So, who remembers the little trip Andy660 organised traveling to the Boegoeberg bash in 2009?? We had some great roads, interesting river crossings and a missile range to cross…
https://wilddog.net.za/forum/index.php?topic=40921.0
Along the way we picked up some odd truck tracks making multipoint turns on farm tracks. We also had a glimpse at some strange cargo on these trucks.
After crossing the Groot Perdepoort (nice river crossings) we all missed the KAT hiding behind a small ridge not a km or two off the brand new highway built in the middle of nowhere. Instead most of us tried to break the land speed record. If anyone looked around we would have seen the KAT7 dish installation.
I travelled to Northern Cape last week for site visit to the MeerKAT dish installation. This as well as the SKA will be constructed at the end on the highway we found in 2009 – had no clue what it was at the time... The site is located on Losberg and Meysdam farms west north west from Carnarvon as shown below.
Currently they have the MeerKAT precursor KAT7 running and estimate to have the 64 MeerKAT dishes operational by 2016. These will be installed on the two farms in a total installation diameter of around 8Km.
The site looks slightly different to what it did back then and changes constantly.
In order to protect the area a radio reserve was created covering quite a vast piece of South Africa. This, along with strict speed restrictions (R5K spot fine apparently) will keep the skies clear for the telescopes.
The completed SKA installation will have dishes installed all-over Africa concentrated in the Karoo. The intermediated dish locations consist of clusters of six to ten dishes (red dots).
I did not draw the inner dishes as there will be around 1500 of them. See https://www.skatelescope.org/public/2011-02_System_delta_CoDR_Documents/18-WP3-050.020.000-R-002-A_SKAConfigurations.pdf for the inner dish layout.
More info on KAT7, MeerKAT and SKA could be found at https://www.ska.ac.za and https://www.skatelescope.org
On our return trip, I chose the straight route, dirt up to Ceres. The N7 was full of road works up to Calvinia. I had a bunch of nervous passengers after leaving the road the previous day almost rolling the LR but managed to keep the rubber on the dirt. The dirt road from Carnavoron to the site is quite bad. We chose not to go down Ou-Berg as it was belting down on Friday and they were nervous enough as it was. My pax never heard of half the towns we drove through. They also had no clue of the history around the old wagon trails in the areas.
While in the area, I visited another site Andy and I was wondering about for some time now… We passed this many times by bike and see it on Google Earth but don’t know what it is.
It turns out to be an Eskom substation.
Now the question is – what is this for??
Anyway, the rest of the trip was quite boring and returned home safely.
... Leftless
So, who remembers the little trip Andy660 organised traveling to the Boegoeberg bash in 2009?? We had some great roads, interesting river crossings and a missile range to cross…
https://wilddog.net.za/forum/index.php?topic=40921.0
Along the way we picked up some odd truck tracks making multipoint turns on farm tracks. We also had a glimpse at some strange cargo on these trucks.
After crossing the Groot Perdepoort (nice river crossings) we all missed the KAT hiding behind a small ridge not a km or two off the brand new highway built in the middle of nowhere. Instead most of us tried to break the land speed record. If anyone looked around we would have seen the KAT7 dish installation.
I travelled to Northern Cape last week for site visit to the MeerKAT dish installation. This as well as the SKA will be constructed at the end on the highway we found in 2009 – had no clue what it was at the time... The site is located on Losberg and Meysdam farms west north west from Carnarvon as shown below.
Currently they have the MeerKAT precursor KAT7 running and estimate to have the 64 MeerKAT dishes operational by 2016. These will be installed on the two farms in a total installation diameter of around 8Km.
The site looks slightly different to what it did back then and changes constantly.
In order to protect the area a radio reserve was created covering quite a vast piece of South Africa. This, along with strict speed restrictions (R5K spot fine apparently) will keep the skies clear for the telescopes.
The completed SKA installation will have dishes installed all-over Africa concentrated in the Karoo. The intermediated dish locations consist of clusters of six to ten dishes (red dots).
I did not draw the inner dishes as there will be around 1500 of them. See https://www.skatelescope.org/public/2011-02_System_delta_CoDR_Documents/18-WP3-050.020.000-R-002-A_SKAConfigurations.pdf for the inner dish layout.
More info on KAT7, MeerKAT and SKA could be found at https://www.ska.ac.za and https://www.skatelescope.org
On our return trip, I chose the straight route, dirt up to Ceres. The N7 was full of road works up to Calvinia. I had a bunch of nervous passengers after leaving the road the previous day almost rolling the LR but managed to keep the rubber on the dirt. The dirt road from Carnavoron to the site is quite bad. We chose not to go down Ou-Berg as it was belting down on Friday and they were nervous enough as it was. My pax never heard of half the towns we drove through. They also had no clue of the history around the old wagon trails in the areas.
While in the area, I visited another site Andy and I was wondering about for some time now… We passed this many times by bike and see it on Google Earth but don’t know what it is.
It turns out to be an Eskom substation.
Now the question is – what is this for??
Anyway, the rest of the trip was quite boring and returned home safely.
... Leftless
