In India: 23 April: At the test lab, round 1 – once we found it!

The guys from the office hired a van & driver to take us to the test lab.  They loaded the van at the office, then picked us up at our hotel.  Unfortunately, their regular driver had a family emergency, and this driver didn’t know the exact location of the test lab.  If you haven’t tried to navigate around Bangalore, you wouldn’t realize how serious a problem that is.  Ugh, it must be impossible to be a taxi driver here.

The company actually sells the equipment to build test labs, and has put together a small demonstration lab that they let us use.

We finally found the lab, unloaded, and set up the equipment.

The basic equipment setup. Our relay is the small box on the brown raised shelf.  The other larger box is the device which generates the deadly surges that we are using to test our relay.

We saw how the equipment performed unspectacularly when subjected to the Electrical Fast Transient (EFT) surge, and then proceeded to make changes in an attempt to get it to pass, or at least to get insight into why it fails.

We had quite a crew there – something like eight of us!

Left to right:Norbert Wegner, Ananthramu, Darshan, me, Manikandan, Ilango, Sowmiyan, Srinivasan

At lunch, we piled back into the van and went to a restaurant nearby, “Gokul Krishna”, all vegetarian.  It was very nice – the food was great, and the service was excellent.  Again though, far too much to eat!  Oof.

We fought with the problem through the day and into the evening.  They were supposed to kick us out at 6 PM, but we begged and they let us stay until 6:30.  We made some progress, but not a lot.