The test receivers for the radio tower aren't exactly small. Due to not having externally available power sources, I ended up using a similar gravity battery system to regularize the power coming from a small mana engine. The mana engine charges the dead gravity battery while the other runs when the power is on. As a result, they're quite heavy. While I'd have preferred making something smaller, these are simply meant to be test systems, rather than final products, so I didn't want to spend a lot of time on developing them.

I made ten in total in order to test reception in a handful of locations around the island, with a few spares to hauling to the second island when the time comes. I also intend to send one to the trade city on the mainland in order to see if it ever gets reception at all. They operate with a moderately sized antenna and a tunable inductor and capacitor to filter signals to our final station signal. They then have a small speaker and amplifier circuit to play out the sound of the broadcast. Each one comes in at about a ton, with most of the weight being the gravity batteries. It's probably overkill, but I didn't put much thought into the exactness of it. My goal was to simply build them out in a way that would let me experiment with them as needed.

With the oversized battery, I can quite easily adjust the total power to the system, increase antenna size, or make plenty of other small changes to them fairly easily. If I tried to engineer them perfectly for this first set of tests, I'd probably have to build new ones if the first ones don't work properly. When it comes to things like this, starting with excess and trimming is a good design philosophy.

I built these receivers out over the course of the remainder of winter in the downtime from working on building things out on the summit. While the tunnel exit and the power station are built in what I assume is the remnants from a long collapsed caldera, the antenna for the station is planned to be built up on the rim a few hundred feet higher than the inside of the caldera. The caldera itself isn't completely closed either, as it seems to be partially eroded into a valley of sorts, with downhill slopes leading out of it towards both cities on the island.

After the first month of winter, the snow storms became less frequent and it became much easier to work around the summit. There was still a significant amount of snow to clear for new constructions, but it didn't fill back into the cleared areas very often. As such, we were able to get pretty much everything that was planned completed, save for the antenna itself. The radio building and antenna site sit a little over a half-mile from the tunnel exit, so it took quite a while to actually build out the path there. For power transport, we're using bulky copper wires in a buried conduit with a faraday cage made of steel wire between the two locations. The radio building itself also has an integrated faraday cage linked to the ground.

The reason for that is the same as why we need to install grounding wires around the antenna. It puts a lot of power into the surrounding area, especially close to the antenna. If we don't electrically isolate it, any wires could act as antennas themselves, and feed that power back into the system, disrupting proper function, or worse, damaging components.

Since the snow calmed down, I didn't even end up needing more construction teams from Zeb. When the teams came back from the mainland, they had a short break before they were ferried off to the second island to start work there. Kao agreed to help us build out the academy when the time comes, but honestly, that won't be for at least another year. We'll have to install a large crystal there first, and growing that will take quite some time. For now, the main work on the island is getting facilities ready to handle a large crystal delivery.

Speaking of, the delivery of our large crystal on the mainland went well enough. There have been a few interesting anomalies as a result, however. We were concerned about leviathans being an issue, and were preparing for the possibility that we'd have to use a different route to leave for a time while slowly killing leviathans like before. This doesn't seem to have been a problem this time, however. I've requested that some oceanic investigations be done to compare the seafloor near the dwarven continent to our island. We're likely over oceanic crust, and our island slopes continue down quite rapidly from our island, leading to deep ocean near land. If the continental crust is shallow enough there, it's possible that the leviathans didn't experience the same sort of pressure that they did on our island.

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It's also possible that something else, like prevailing ocean currents, play a role. I suspect it might be both. Prevailing winds are toward the mainland from our island, and when we installed large crystals on our island, the number of leviathans between us and the mainland dropped considerably, especially during winter and after our most recent crystal was installed. It's possible that there has been a trailing effect where our trade city simply didn't have any leviathans nearby to begin with as a result of the crystal on Kembora.

In any case, other than having to begin payouts to displaced individuals, there weren't any immediate drawbacks to installing the crystal there. On the contrary, it actually ended up displacing more eagles from Kembora back towards the mainland. They seem to have settled into the nearby mountain ranges to the trade city. For good measure, a feeding altar was set up for them, but they only show up occasionally. It's likely that, at least initially, there seems to be enough of whatever their prey animal is within the nearby hills that they aren't bothering our city much.

It took a while for the snow on the summit to melt. The seasons get pretty extreme here though, so it wasn't that long of a wait. By early in the second month of the year, warmer rains had melted off the remaining snow, and we got to work assembling and raising the antenna. It's a monster of a structure. It stands at just shy of 1000 feet tall made of steel triangular sections with a central antenna line. We used steel cables that were attached via lightstone insulator sections to eventually winch the whole thing up into position. Multiple high tension cables were attached up and down the height of it to stabilize it.

Even though the structure itself is fairly simple, it took us just over 35 days to assemble and hoist it into place. By that point, it was already the thirteenth day of the third month of the year. That said, from pretty much anywhere on our island, and even from portions of the next island, you can see the tower, which is exactly what I wanted. The eagles seemed to initially be intrigued by it, but quickly gave up interest. If they had tried to do something to the tower, it would have been a nightmare to deal with, but since they don't seem to care, it's not an issue.

If they had bothered it, I planned on trying to install ultrasonic deterrents into the area utilizing our new speaker technology. If we get any new migratory eagles that settle in places they shouldn't, we should consider trying to use it to encourage them to move again to a different area.

The massive stirling engine was also installed, so everything should be ready within a few days to begin doing radio testing. There are actually a lot of interesting questions that need to be answered related to radio broadcasting over long distances here. For example, we're closer to a binary star pair, and we're the smaller of the two planets in a binary planet system. That could have heavy influence on the ionosphere of our planet, if it has one at all. That could heavily influence where and how radio waves travel through the air. The good news is that it shouldn't affect how they travel through the ground, which is a big part of why I wanted to go with low frequency radio waves.

Low frequency waves can sort of hug the surface, which lets them reach into valleys without clear line of sight to a tower. On earth, that meant that AM radio stations, which were a lower frequency, could be heard in mountainous regions more readily. They also could bounce off the ionosphere to travel absurdly long distances at night when the height of the ionosphere was higher up. My hope is that the ground waves, regardless of ionospheric interaction, will allow this station to reach all four of our islands at all times of day. Anything extra is incidental.

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