Thankfully, none of those issues were due to our fun cabling solutions.
On Friday, Avi and I took PistenBully 314 out to collect the huddle test data.
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| Q330 datalogger (bottom) and B14 baler (top). The B14 baler is basically an oversized, heavy duty, 6-lb hard-drive. This style of datalogger/hard-drive is slowly being aged out and replaced with a model that uses SD cards. |
Remember: it takes too much power to telemeter seismic data back from most PASSCAL sites (and still last through the dark winter), so we actually have to go collect the hard-drives in-person. This is easy enough for the Castle Rock test site, where it's just a short jaunt in the PistenBully to get there, but much more difficult for sites in West Antarctica (such as POLENET). This is part of why it's so devastating when we can't get out to sites for a long time -- between several meters of snow accumulation, and our hard-drives filling up at 64GB, it's pretty critical that we visit our Antarctic seismic sites every 3-4 years.
Anyway. This was just a low-stakes huddle test. We collected the hard-drives and took them back to the office to check out the data. We also emailed over a snippet of the low-sample rate data back to the Sensor Group at PASSCAL.
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| We inspect 314 every time we take it out and check off on this checklist. The trip on Friday was our 10th! |
The sensor group told us that the data for two of the sensors looked a little wonky, and some of the dataloggers collected data at a higher sample rate. We decided to go out on Saturday and make sure all of the Q330s had the same configuration file -- something we forgot to check before we set up the test last week.
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| The Castle Rock trail / snow road. |
So we put on our ECW and headed out Saturday afternoon (recall that we don't have any more two-day weekends -- Sundays only for the rest of my deployment).
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| Every time we take the PistenBully out, we have to wait for the engine to warm up to 140 degrees before driving. This usually takes about 10min. It was especially cold Saturday, so it took closer to 20min :( |
The first problem we noticed at the test site had nothing to do with the huddle test. We installed an infrasound sensor several weeks ago as part of the equipment that will run over winter to prepare for next season on Erebus. The infrasound sensor was placed underneath a windscreen -- and the windscreen has been completely filled with snow. This doesn't bode well for the infrasound sensors' ability to collect good data. We may have to think of another solution to this.
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| Windscreen lifted up to expose the completely buried infrasound sensor underneath. |
When we opened the plywood enclosure, we noticed immediately that the GPS was not connected to the datalogger. We had used a TNC-BNC adapter (because of aforementioned cabling constraints), and the adapter had somehow snapped in half. This would explain why some of the seismic data looked weird compared to the rest -- the timing was completely off.
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| This is supposed to be one piece.... |
So that explained one problem. We then tried uploading the new configuration file to all of the dataloggers. This was a very difficult task, considering that the wind chill was in single-digits (Fahrenheit) and it's hard to use a laptop with bulky gloves on. Also impeding us was a weird error message when we tried to upload the configs. Neither of us had seen the error before, and after several attempts (and cold fingers), we decided it was time to head back to the lab and phone home.
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| Error message in red at the bottom of the screen. As you might notice, the sun glare on the screen is quite intense (being surrounded by white snow and all). This was another difficulty when using the laptop. |
We called the head of the Logistics Group, Pnina, who's worked at PASSCAL nearly since it opened, and were told that this error message is not actually that big of a deal, and shows up quite often. It's just one of the weird quirks with the Q330 dataloggers. She told us how to fix the problem easily, so we're all set up for next time we head out. Pnina's spent several seasons in Antarctica with PASSCAL, and it was also nice to commiserate with her on our field season being cancelled.
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| Our glorious steed at the deceptively cold test site. |
It was good to be back inside -- the test site had been so cold. The weather here has been growing rapidly cooler in the past week or so; averaging mid- to high- 20s with some pretty intense wind chill down to the teens or below.
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| My water bottle got a nice icy crust. I had to crack through the top to be able to drink. |
Overall, a day well spent. We discovered some problems, but got solid solutions, and learned something new about the Q330s. We're planning to go back later this week (weather-dependent) and upload the config files for real.
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| My shadow carrying a bamboo pole with a flag. We've set up a few crossed flags to warn hikers of the pits at the site that we dug to raise the solar panels. |
Comments
314 is my new bff.