Day 3 - June 18th

Maandag 18 juni

By Arnout Smeenge, translated by Joost Kuckartz

"It was seven o'clock getting up, right?". This was shouted through the sleeping hall. This scared me a bit, but luckily it really was 7 o'clock. Allright, getting up. A fast shower (which had to, there were only 3 showers for everybody), breakfast and into the vans for the first company visit of the study trip.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) was listed with a visit to the hydro power plants Sir Adam Beck I and II. It started with a presentation of the Public Affairs guy. I don't know how his name anymore. A lot of numbers were thrown at us. Of course all high numbers, they produce really a lot of energy. Around 70% of the total electricity needs of Ontario. After the talk about the company itself and the new tunnel they will build from the back of the Niagara Falls (10 kilometer, 14,4 meter in diameter, capable of getting 500GW of extra power from the Adam Beck II) we got a tour. We saw the new control rooms and even the real anti-linux people were surprised they used Windows. A lot of work went in the diverting of bugs and taking care of the programming to work after each update.

Two hours later the trip to the next company started: Shaw Broadcast & Tracking. They're busy with satellite tv in Canada and the tracking of trucks all around North-America. At this moment they're active at the switching to HDTV (which is more implemented in Canada than in The Netherlands). Besides they're testing their systems so they will still work in several disaster scenarios. The talk about tracking was the most interesting and electrical engineering minded. A lot of terms like FDMA, CDMA and TDMA passed.

Back to the hotel we found ourselves into a traffic jam with "viewers to the other side". Because of this we had all the time to test the FM transmitters. The range of those wasn't big enough, so some work still needs to be done there. After arrival at the hotel it was time to go for dinner. We had the choice between steak and a buffet (worse than yesterday). Many therefore first chose for steak, but after spotting the prices more than half left the restaurant. Well, the steak was delicious and the buffet seemed to be good as well. A little relaxed time in the hotel's pool with a beer concluded this very busy day perfectly.