About a week or so ago I headed up to Jackson to deal with a remote control issue.  On that trip I uncovered another more serious issue with the uninterruptible power supply.  I decided to make another trip before the Christmas holiday so I wouldn’t have issue in case of power failure at the site…This site is rather difficult to access during the winter.  It requires either a snow cat, a long walk on snow shoes or assistance from the ski area to access the building.

Snow King mountain in Jackson Hole…Quite a formidable task to get to the towers at the summit (upper left, in front of the sunrise)…I was able to ride the ski lift to the top and then take a snowmobile up to the tower.

The equipment rack…My laptop is set up and ready to service the gear…
(Apologies for the blurry image)

On the bottom is the Uninterruptible Power Supply that was in service.  It had displayed a battery fault on my last visit.  Oddly enough it was not showing a fault on this visit but I decided to replace it anyway.  The unit on the top is a newer UPS of higher quality.  This should provide even better power to the attached equipment since it is a true “double-conversion” UPS which is always producing clean power from the batteries rather than just switching briefly to the battery in the event of a power glitch.  It also contains an automatic bypass switch in case of failure so the equipment should always have some sort of power provided.

I discovered a new issue on this visit…There was no audio from our STL receiver.  This receiver provides audio from an alternate satellite downlink located in town.  It is a fallback in case the dish on the mountain should fail or become full of snow.  I’ll need to deal with this on yet another visit…

The other issue I had come up to the site to address was the remote control…All operating system and configuration files are contained on a small compact flash card.  The errors persisted even after replacing the card and re-loading the software so I’m going to have to revisit this issue as well…Fun…

Reloading the software on the remote control…It didn’t fix the issue, unfortunately…

Yet another issue!  Our HD equipment failed after cycling power when replacing the UPS.  Wonderful.  The part that failed in this equipment is obsolete and will now require major upgrades in order to restore HD service.  An upgrade to this equipment was planned anyway so I suspect this issue will now wait until that upgrade is performed…

“Skyler” from Snow King Mountain Resort awaits with a snowmobile to take me back down to the lift.  The powder made for a difficult ride with two people on a sled not optimized for powder but we made the ride without major issues.

Getting ready to board the ski lift for the ride back down…

Going down!  It’s a LONG ride!

Looking down toward the bottom through the trees…

A wonderful view of Jackson Hole as I decend.  It was actually a very nice ride.