While Donner researched the electronics needed to get his antennas to sync, he helped his father around the farm. Each week brought a delivery of some new equipment to make the farm more self-sufficient. They soon had the robotic vegetable gardeners working. Then they automated the water purification and distribution system, including the well, stream and the rainwater cisterns. The fruit orchard was planted and attended to by a specialized robot. The work for Donner and his dad soon devolved into keeping the machines in good condition and updating their programming.
Working on his antennas and helping his dad didn't keep Donner completely occupied. He also explored around the farm and the adjacent woods and soon became comfortable with his new surroundings. He missed his friends but realized how much of their time together had been spent playing games online which they could still do.
These exploratory wanderings were something that he came to look forward to. The woods were always changing according to the weather or time of day, the nearby stream was quiet or raucous according to the last rain, and the birds and deer he saw were mostly unwary of him as if he were not the intruder, he thought himself to be. He made it a goal to learn more about the plants and animals in this part of the country.
Just after Donner turned fourteen it was time for school to start. He took his classes at home online with his mother as his tutor. Donner's mother was well qualified to teach with one degree in Biology and another in Mathematics. She had even completed much of a Ph.D. in Microbiology before a disagreement with her adviser forced her out of the program. In fact, she and her husband had worked in the same lab, becoming close when Jack also was forced out of the program because of illness.
It was just before the end of the school year that Donner first got his project online. The electronics he designed with the help of his Annie used predictive look-ahead to estimate the necessary phase adjustment for each antenna signal. This look-ahead design gave the tracking motors the time they needed to maintain a lock on the satellite signal. This reduced the corrections necessary to something that a fast processor, such as the one in his Annie, could digitize and then use to eliminate the remaining errors mathematically.
Donner set the system up for nightly surveys of the geosynchronous region with an analysis the next day using his Annie. It wasn't long until he found a very unusual signal.
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