03 MAY 1999 - Bruxells
An early morning today as we get started turning a restarant into a television transmission center and makeshift newsroom. I started early getting a web page update together and taking care of some e-mail with breakfast in the room. The lack of sleep from the past few days getting the gear out of the US and on to Europe are taking their toll. I ordered breakfast for the room next to mine! Luckily it was just coffee and croisants and the kitchen was able to kick one out quick after I called.

We arrived at the workspace around 0830 and got started unpacking and organizing. There is a rough procedure to putting everything together. The first things to come out are the rack-mounted equipment which gets stacked in a central location. At the same time you run around putting power strips all over the place, and hooking up power converters to take the 220 volts in Europe and make it 110V for US gear that doesn't switch on it's own. All of this happens after you figure out how to lay out the room, and drag all the tables into place and get the pile of gear to a position where it's accessable and one can read what's in each box.

With the racks set up and power run, things get plugged in, double checked for the right power voltage, and then carefully turned on. This is a major hurdle, since if a piece of gear doesn't power up you wind up spending time fixing it that should be spent setting up more gear and running cables. This time everything decided to power up.
Cathederal St - Michel et Ste - Gudule near the Grand'Place was built starting in 1226. It holds the relics of St. Gudule. Not much is known about her beyond being the daughter of a 7th century nobleman.
Taking a break from setting up the workspace. Equipment racks in background, tables for each network in the foreground.
That done, it was time to take a walk with NATO security and find a place for the satellite truck. This of course takes about an hour and a half of "no, we can't do that" until NATO finally decides to let you carry out the original plan. The same negotiation is done for a standup location for reporters to do their on-camera work, and the paths to follow for running our cables from the workspace to the rest of the world.

This causes some problems for us. Because of the way NATO is laid out, our workspace is about 1600 feet away from the standup location. While we have enough copper cable to make the run, the signal quality down that length is practically unusable. What we need is a fiber optic cable set up. Instead of using an electrical signal like the copper wire, the fiber uses light to transmit a signal as far as seven miles without degredation. So we called the main stop in Frankfort and had them send us one. It would arrive after lunch and be run from the standup location to the NATO briefing room.
Marco, our satellite truck operator from the Dutch firm Intrax. His partner Thom is off doing something else...
In the mean time we had to run cable from the workspace to the NATO briefing room. This cable run would carry back to the workspace the standup location and two cameras in the NATO briefing room, and provide a spare set of channels in case one was damaged.

At most location we would run the cable down the hallway from our workspace to the room, a run of about 300 feet or so. But for security reasons (that I never quite understood) we were told to run the cables under the floor. This increased the length to about 750 feet and would require drilling through the floor of the workspace into the crawl space below, and then making a circuitous route through the crawl spaces to the briefing room. Luckily for us, the building engineers made this run for us and did it in about 30 minutes. On our own, I estimated it would take us about 3 hours, maybe more.
Into the NATO basement through an access hatch, which for some reason is in the ladies bathroom!
Checking a cable connection in the NATO basement, the part with the high cealing
We decided to wrap up for the day around 2330 in the evening. We had gotten a lot done, but still had much to accomplish. The press corps would arrive in less than 24 hours, and there was yet more cable to run, connections to be made, and tests to be done.

One the way back to the hotel tonight I noticed that many of the tunnels around Bruxells are named after women (Tunnel Stephanie/Stephanietunnel, etc). I pondered the meaning of this over a late glass of port before turning in for the night.