Another cool partly cloudy day.

Started off the day at the ISS1 profiler site where we removed the covers from the RASS dishes that we had installed at setup to stop too much snow building up in the dishes.  One of the four covers had blown off at some point, however there was only about an inch of ice and snow inside.  Started up the RASS from about 17UTC in rass_150m mode.  The volume was set to around 7 - 7.5 VAC (as measured by a Fluke multimeter) which produced around 70 dB (as measured by an iphone) acoustic noise at around 30 meters range, and RASS signal up to around 800m AGL - although that will vary a lot with time.  On the 50V power supply, RASS mode is drawing around 3.83A and on the 31V supply around 1.93A.  In winds mode (100m), the draw on the 50V supply is 3.46A and on the 31V supply is 1.77A.

At the sounding site, we installed the surface-met 3-meter tower (with Lufft WS800 and PTB220 sensors).  There had been some concern that the Lufft (which has a small radar for measuring precip) might cause radio frequency interference for Eric's Micro Rain Radar since both use the 24 GHz band, however no obvious interference was been seen so far.  Also repositioned the Ubquiti network link to the ISFS base to try to improve the link (which only operates intermittently).  The signal strength improved a little, however still drops out.

We gave Eric, Gannet and Pauline a lesson on our sounding system.  This went well, except that the balloon burst a little earlier than usual (around 250 hPa) for unknown reasons.  During some training on switching to a new Helium cylinder, we found that there is a small Helium leak on the regulator/flow mete board, which we will investigate further tomorrow.


Sounding lession with Gannet (and family), Pauline, and Eric.

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