BSCC’s submarine fibre optic cable, linking our Cable Landing Station (CLS) at Ngeremlengui – CAP-N – with the GTA CLS in Piti, Guam, is done, if not yet completely dusted.

Certification and Accreditation (C&A) is a formal process in which both the supplier (NEC of Japan) and the Purchaser (BSCC) conduct a series of tests, including a three day confidence trial of the whole end-to-end system, which is only possible after the final splice.

At the beginning of the confidence trial Richard Misech, of the BSCC Project Management Unit (PMU), keeps a wary eye in Nakashima-san of NEC. Yumoto-san, another NEC engineer, is more nonchalant.

There is not much room in the CLS now. That bank of doors behind Richard is duplicated on the other side, behind them racks of submarine terminal equipment that we expect to run with just and exact perfection.

Over the next two days, the system performed to that standard. While nobody expected anything different, it was great to see this some 72 hours later:

That does indeed say zero errors after three days! And there were quite a few power fluctuations and outages in the grid over that time, so it means that the double-back-up power system is also working perfectly.

This is a superb piece of engineering, and a credit to the four main contractors whose work is now coming together – NEC for the submarine network, Flexenclosure for the CLS and power systems, Surangels for the civil works and McCann Consulting International (MCI) for the project management.

Look at the smiles on these dials! That is me, Nakashima-san of NEC (behind), BSCC PMU’s Nishikawa-san and Richard Misech, also PMU, at the successful conclusion of the confidence trial.

Meanwhile, the radio tower that very observant and thorough students of this web site might have noticed in the graphic of the cable station on the Home page, is now completed as well.

Richard put on a safety harness and climbed the tower to check the line-of-sight radio paths he had calculated a few months ago. It would be a pity to find out we had built the tower a little too short. From half way up, he could already see the primary target, Ngatpang mountain.

In order to see the secondary target, Ngerchelchuus mountain, he had to go to the very top and look west through binoculars.

Better him than me! I have been in the telecommunications business a long time, and I have met a few radio linemen. They are all nuts! While he is not a radio lineman, I suspect Richard has something in common with them. He did return to earth safely.

Those who are not Palauan may not realise that the 20,000 or so Palauan people on our planet speak a beautiful, and unique language. I don’t speak it much at all, but I do know that the “ch” in those place names is silent. So Ngerchelchuus is pronounced more like “Nerrelus”.

The next two weeks are devoted to system training.