Thursday 19 February 2026
Great news! We have booked tickets for Solomon and I to
return to Peru. Not unlike our first trip to Peru back in 2016, Sandi noticed
some great deals ahead of time and she jumped on those to lock in our travel
for 3 ½ weeks away. We depart Perth on Wednesday 24 June and return Saturday 18
July which is during school holidays in WA.
Solomon is now 15 and has been making huge progress with his
Spanish learning - it is definitely all coming back to him. I have no doubt
that his language will be far superior to mine as being 15, age and a sharp
mind is on his side. And he will be an invaluable help and company for me on
this trip.
It is amazing having such a supportive wife in Sandi who is
100% supportive of this work.
In writing this I realise now I did not provide an update on
the satellite change we did over the weekend back on 22 to 23 November. So here
following is a summary. It was a 22-hour literally no-break effort by the team
in Peru and me from my home office in Perth. Sandi kept me going with food and
drink. It was not meant to take anything like this long – we ran into a number
of issues with the commissioning, which for the first half (at least 15 hours),
was caused by some inexperienced operators in the Network Operation Centre (NOC)
in the US.
They also had an internal administration issue where the NOC
operators thought we were a week early to move to the new satellite lease and
were denying us permission to proceed. By that time, we had already repointed
the main uplink antenna (losing the previous commissioning) and there was no
going back! ☹ Being the weekend, it was hard to get hold of their
management to sort that out. Then they had technical problems with one of their
(large) monitoring antennas in the US that they were using to align our small carrier
uplink from Peru on the new satellite (SES IS-34).
Countless adjustments were made, each measured, then adjusted
again and the cycle repeated over and over - sometimes with as little as half a
degree at a time whilst communicating all this in Spanish to the team on the
ground in Peru. We persevered without ceasing as all the time the radio in Peru
was off the air and we could not simply come back later. Eventually we were
passed over to some very experienced NOC operators and significant progress was
made where we were able to successfully pass the commissioning.
There were more details to this ordeal, but I think you get
the picture. It did add an amount of fatigue to our small team who after a night’s
sleep spent the remainder of the week travelling 1000s of kilometres repointing
all 11 of our other remote satellite antennas to SES IS-34. It is a good thing
we will not need to do this again for another 8 years when the SES IS-34
satellite we are on now reaches its end of life.
Back in Perth Sandi said it was like watching a scene from one
of our family favourite movies “The Dish” with NASA “talking technical” with
American accents whilst I relayed the adjustments in Spanish to the team in Peru.
"The
Dish" scene at my home office in Perth 😊
This work got the radio signal working again over the satellite
to all our FM transmission sites which reaches over 2 million in Peru 24 x 7. And
potentially to 636,000,000 Spanish speaking in all of the Americas and Europe direct
from satellite to home - see previous blog post.
So why our return to Peru mid-2026? This is to complete the job
by getting the telemetry uplink working on all the Diospi Suyana satellite antennas.
What does that do you might ask? This sends data back from the remote sites (some
over 12 hours by road away from the Diospi Suyana studio) to report back to the
studio on the equipment at the sites so problems can be identified quickly and
the right action taken to sort them out. In some cases, avoiding many days of travel
on the treacherous, unpoliced Peruvian highways.
The airfares are mostly covered by our previous mission
funds, but then we still need to cover the remainder such as renewal of
passports, travel interconnects, food and accommodation etc.
There you have it. We are counting down the days trying to
cram Spanish refreshers. Thank you for your prayers and support of this good
work. As the Diospi Suyana Centro de Medios team motto goes, “it’s the best
message in the world” as it contains the Gospel message of Jesus Christ who is
the one and only hope for all.
Chris
Web browser link to this post: https://welchesinperu.blogspot.com/2026/02/a-new-satellite-and-our-2026-return-to.html
