Gary and Ted setup sensors on the tower in preparation for INEGI climbers the next day.
Inventory at site:
- Ec150 1392
- Csat3a 2035
- Nr01 2536
- EC100 box 1693
- RMYoung ARL 98c0056-038
- Ubiquiti
- DSM tnw09
- 2 x 15m bulgin cables
- Soil sensors had already been installed, so those serial numbers were not recorded by us.
Inventory at tower:
- 5m cable, Metek s/n 2007 09007/01
- 10m cable, Metek s/n 2007 08017/01
- Ubiquiti
- Mote ID5
Ethernet access port will need to be plugged with putty.
Meteks aimed with arrow towards tower along boom, lettering facing away.
Some movement today...
INEGI will send two crews here on Wed to get as much done as possible. The prediction of rain and other INEGI commitments have prevented them from committing to more time, though Thurs might be possible. In the meantime, our tensiometers have arrived and we have learned that we can climb if our staff determine that a particular tower is safe. We are optimistic that this criterion can be met for the majority of the towers. Tomorrow, we will deliver as much equipment as possible to the site and prepare booms to be raised in order to maximize tower climbing time.
Other tidbits:
- Gordon has fixed the biggest bug in cockpit, so we now have real-time plots
- A few more towers have been prepped in the ops center
- Electricians have been working on the sw ridge, so we connected DC power to 2 towers (though the main line is not yet live)
- There have been some power issues in the ops center itself, including the breaker for the ballroom tripping. We yet don't know the source.
on tse13, the 60 and 80m TRHs weren't showing up. 80m just needed a ^R to restart the fan. (I note that RH=100%.) 60m seems totally dead, even after a power cycle. 
Found that the "differential protection" circuit for the ops center was tripped when I got here at 1830. From what I see in the data files, this might have happened about 1630, with ustar losing data (but of course, the DSMs stilll haven't been rsync'd).
I realized that, if the cable to the mote is disconnected, it wasn't a good idea for it to have live power. Thus, I did a "pio 7 0" this morning (we had light rain then). This should be installed in a dsm_up script so that it is repeated if power is cycled.
- Check tse13t power mote, and if necessary reconnect, and turn the port power back once connection is confirmed.
A few things done today. Now all sensors are reporting from the 10 towers that are operating.
- We've organized our teams and instrumentation to be able to start immediately on Monday.
- DTU again came to the rescue and installed the missing SHT sensors in our TRH housings on tse13. In the process, we've lost the voltage-monitoring mote at tse13t, but this isn't a big deal. I'm guessing that the Binder cable was knocked off.
- We installed DC power drops at 3 valley sites.
- 3 more towers are prepped.
- tse09's 24V power connection came loose this morning and was serviced.
- I played around a bit more with webplots.
- Kurt and I did feasibilities for 3 future projects...
Consistent with most of VERTEX and Perdigao, tomorrow (Sunday) is a down day.
Some progress being made...
Our tensiometers were held up in customs. This now should be solved, but they won't arrive until Monday. In the meantime, we have learned that the document we had on tower tensions a) isn't for any of the towers being used here and b) has a specification for the maximum tension for the guy wires, but not the working tension. We will ask if there are other documents and may be able to go back to the engineering firm that prepared this document to determine a working tension. However, we now are in a situation where we do not have a set of specifications to compare any of our measured tensions to. In this case, we do not think that we will (ever) be allowed to climb these towers.
Thus, we have asked INEGI if they can supply climbers for all of the towers, hopefully starting next week. Obviously, we would provide all ground support. We will meet tomorrow to see if we can organize into 3 crews, each with one or two INEGI climbers. A secondary issue is that we would need INEGI climbers for all maintenance visits and tear-down as well.
Now for the good news: DTU has enabled AC power now for 4 of the tall masts. After some work on the network, software updates for the DSMs that we hung in December, and enabling of DTU data, we now have 10 sites reporting. There are two more 60m masts that require minor AC power fixes, but this needs to be done by the electricians.
Other items:
- All towers that have been built are now prepped
- 3 of the NCAR team, Cornell, and 1 of the DTU team have now headed home
Another slow day, especially with rain that has come and is forecast to hang around for a while. Most of the crew worked a half day. Tensiometers still hadn't arrived by 6pm tonight, so we're anxious about tomorrow and the weekend. I hope to update this shortly with news that they are here. Otherwise, we'll have nothing to do until Monday...
However, due to DTU's efforts, we now have power to tse13. Since this is a repeater, this allowed connection to several other towers that have been powered in the last few days. Thus, we now have data from 6 towers streaming in. At least one more tower is powered up and just needs a few WiFi settings to be adjusted.
In other news:
- Finished prepping the valley sites (even the 3 towers that are not yet erected). Now only have 1 more tower erect that hasn't been prepped.
- Got the rudiments of wwwplots running. This is being served up to the world at: http://ops-perdigao.dyndns.org/isf/projects/Perdigao/isfs/qcdata/ Scripts still need to be started to update this page automatically.
- Apparently, Gordon has been updating cockpit, though we haven't started running it yet (due to no streams of data until late today).
- The last (of 3) 4-component radiometer installations and its soil sensors are done. We still have about 10 soils to install, but many are waiting for Samortecnica to finish work at these sites (since there has been a significant amount of surface disturbance as the towers are built).
- Ted and Santiago were to have finished configuration of the project's WiFi gear.
- Cornell leaves tomorrow, having installed their seismometers and 3 of 4 lidars.
- DTU will have help from the municipality to install their 2 or 3 heavy lidars tomorrow.
S/N 01256 (from OU) seems not to like being touched. In the lab, it works fine sitting down, but when touched flags nearly every sample as bad. We should put this mounted low, just in case this problem occurs in the field.
Another day of waiting...
Our tensionmeter shipment is due in tomorrow, so still no climbing. We have asked INEGI to arrange for Samortecnica to be ready to work on tower retensioning on Friday. Complicating things are that rain is expected on-and-off starting tomorrow, breaking our run of great (but chilly) weather. Another complication is that we lose 3 of our crew members on Friday. We have had several discussions about staff scheduling, but a lot seems to depend on how Friday goes...
A field crew went out to work on power and made a lot of progress. The electricians also have been continuing to add power drops, so several towers are now up. Unfortunately, the electricians are having a hard time getting a good ground at the tse13 power drop (their last measurement was 200 ohms and they want 20), so they still haven't run the power cable from the new box location to the mast. DTU has prepped this, and at least one other box, so that the tower can come up as soon as power goes to it.
In the ops center, almost all of the towers that are built have been prepped. We also worked on software and scripts for webplots and data transfer.
We spent a bit of time helping DTU to position their lidars.
I'm told that Cornell now have 3 of their 4 lidars powered up, 2 are communicating (over cell phones). They also have installed the seismometers, though there still are no power drops on the sw ridge.
Notes to myself...
- Change the ridge repeater from tse04 to rsw06 (because tse04's construction is delayed): Steve Oncley
- pull power "Y" cable from tse04t box.
- swap tse04t's 20W DC-DC converter with a 10W DC-DC conver
- climb to install "Y" cable and swap in 20W DC-DC converter on rsw06
- add access point Ubiquiti to rsw06
Still waiting for tensiometers to arrive from Boulder. In the meantime...
- Kurt/Lucas/Laura/Bob? ran up and down the mountainside trying to power up stations.
- Dan helped the INEGI crew instrument tse05. The last 60m tower is now up and instrumented. Its solar-power system needs a couple of batteries and then should be working.
- Andy and I prepped 4 more towers.
- Ted and Santiago prepped Ubiquitis, tweaked the network configuration, and arranged for a bittorrent stream of data to Boulder
- Gary doesn't know what he did, but he stayed warm working outside in the parking lot...
Portuguese outfitted 60m tse-6 (tower 22) mast with DTU sonics and NCAR trh sensors. Was unable to power up and test due to lack of batteries for the solar system. Batteries will be provided by Portuguese.
Due to conflict with location of 10m sonic, it was moved to 16m. TRH was moved to 16m to match sonic measurement level.
Currently left to do:
- Install Batteries and wire solar system Daniel Buonome
- Install Barometer inlet at 2m Daniel Buonome
- Verify Operation of tse06 Daniel Buonome
We met with the tower company again today and appear to have a path forward to lift our climbing stoppage. The company will fix the saddles, when obvious problems are noted. They will retension towers with us monitoring with our tensiometers (these should be in FedEx to us now, to arrive Wed.). Clearly this will take some time, but is the solution we wanted.
Today's tasks:
- Prepped tse05 (the last 60m tower) for the INEGI crew to install tomorrow. They installed 2 of the 3 solar panels on this tower today to get ready.
- Connected AC power to rne02 and rne03, which are now reporting (though rne02's 20m RMY is not reporting good data).
- More ops center network work. We did have a brief outage that took a while to recover from since I let a key go up the mountain.
- Prepped the remaining (all?) user sensor booms
DTU and INEGI crews are now at the site, ARL having left over the weekend. Cornell is still here as well.