LBA repairs

Well, as reported, the jänis had struck twice and that meant lots of repair work for us. Actually in total there were 14 x LBA aerials to fix.

Status on 27-Aig-2014

The storm damaged ones were the most work. There required fitting new connectors (the old ones had been ripped clean off during the impacts). The jänis-attacked LBAs were more numerous, but less time consuming.

Repaired LBA line (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The fix was adding a new length of nylon guy line. A double-fisherman's bend is used to join the new section of line to the old and a bowline is used to make the loop to hook over the peg.

To discourage the jänis from simply biting through these again, we smeared the lines with a combination of spray lubricant and grease. This is waterproof and should give a bad smell and texture, thus deterring further jänis attacks.

However, in the long-term, we'll still need to work out a better way of protecting the LBA aerial lines.

Jänis attacks!

Last week we made a service visit to KAIRA. There were four LBA aerials still down from the blizzard of 2014 and these needed fixing. However, on arrival at the site, we noted that there were some other LBA aerials down.

What?!

We hadn't noticed this in the data, so it must have been recent. And inspection of the field indicated that the nylon lines had been cut on multiple LBA aerials, which is what had caused them to fall.

A cut LBA line. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Field of woe. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

We believe that the cause of this is a jänis (Wikipedia). These creatures like to gnaw on things and it looks like the LBA array was the target. Knowing our luck, it was probably the cute jänis we saw a while back.


What's worse, on the second day, we found yet more LBA aerials down. The jänis had struck again! (This led to much silliness on twitter.)

In total, some 10 LBAs were downed over two days (26-27 Aug 2014). More repair work for us then.

Baby mountain hares

We've a few mountain hares about the site, but recently there have been some leverets (= baby hares) at the KAIRA site.

Mountain leveret near the storage container (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Mountain leveret under the High-Band Antenna array (Photo: J. Keskitalo)

The Finnish word for mountain hare is jänis.  This is also a slang word for someone who is a bit shy and reserved. The Latin scientific name of the mountain hare is Lepus timidus . So as you might imagine, these are not particularly bold creatures and we are lucky to get photographs of them.