Page History

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A lightning strike on the afternoon of Sept 27 knocked out power to the base trailer and damaged equipment on the 20m main tower.  Kurt restored power mid-morning Sept 28 and we assessed damage to the main tower.  Our best guess is that the lightning struck near the base trailer and a current surge flowed down the power cable to DSM M21, totally trashing the charge controller and , the PC104 stack, and the power interface panel.  Many of the sensors associated with M21 were found inoperative, but M21 appears to have acted as an expensive 'fuse', limiting damage to M22 and its associated sensors.  Gordon wrote:

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"All sensors except for one at the C site are reporting.  Sodars are OK, I hear.  The Piccarro was not connected to AC. It  It apparently suffered damage via the serial cable from the main tower DSM. So the damage was on the systems connected to the AC circuit to the main and OSU tower.  I think Tom and Kurt agree that it seems the lightning didn't strike either tower but the surge came in from the AC circuit.

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The sensor damage on the main tower was determined as follows:in the following tables.  Sensors marked NG (Not Good) were removed and transported to Boulder.  We also found that one of the four sensors at each of the two soil sites were bad and brought down its mote if connected.  I recall that the soil temperature probe was bad at Grass, but the connector labels at Cactus were inadequate to determine the bad sensor (not the TP01 in my recollection).  The bad soil sensors were disconnected from the motes but not disinterred.