Weather: Mostly cloudy this morning with gradual clearing by midday today. Cool and very windy through the afternoon. Tomorrow's forecast is for mostly sunny skies and cooler temperatures, with gusty conditions much of the day.
Tasking:
- The morning data check is considerably more challenging now that data is only reported every 3 hours. At first glance, everything looked normal, however under closer inspection it seems that at least some towers did not make it through the night. We weren't able to confirm if all towers went down, as relm and uconv1 both reported at all Ubiquity "windows" through the night. Plotting battery voltage suggests that lconvt/lconv1 failed before 0300, relt/rel1 failed around 0305, lconvm/lconv2 failed around 0320, and init failed sometime between 0330-0600 CST. My guess is that relm also failed after 0630, as it showed a voltage just about 11.5 V at that time and the sun was not yet rising. Conversely, uconv may have held on throughout the night since it showed a voltage of 11.87 at that time. The batteries did receive some solar charging yesterday, all peaking above 13.5 V just before noon before dropping off fairly rapidly after noon.
- The initial plan for today was to use our generator to power 2 battery chargers that Ned purchased, but a) we couldn't start our generator, and b) by the time we hooked the chargers up to batteries at rel using April's generator, the sun had started to poke through the clouds enough to make it difficult to discern what impact (if any) the chargers were having. By about 1200 we had tested voltages at all battery banks and determined that all were nearly fully charged at 13+ volts. This indicates that the solar panels were charging the batteries and thus the impact of our charger was unclear.
- We further tested the charge of the batteries at init and removed one to test with the charger in the base trailer. The test gave us no further insights. The DSM on initm was powered off during this time, approx. 1400-1500.
- We also twisted ratchet straps at most side towers in order to reduce the vibrations of the straps in these strong winds. Our efforts seemed to be successful in doing so.
- No other issues were noted at this time.
It appears there will be no IOP tonight, but one is tentatively scheduled for tomorrow night beginning at 2100 CST.