Blog from Nov 16, 2010

Nov 16, around 15:30 MST

Chris installed the sonic head at playa1

Nov 16, 15:50 MST

Phone conversation with John.

Fixed charging issue, one solar panel wasn't connected.

Powered up soil probes. Soil battery was at 12.6 V. Qsoil didn't report initially, cable wasn't fully plugged in.

Cell signal is about 64% of full signal.

No TRH at this site yet.

Nov 16, 14:30 MST

Per phone conversation with John.

On site Ling, John, Kurt.

Communications to this site went out last night, which appears to be due to the USB modem not being fully plugged into the router. USB light was off on the router. After pushing the modem in, comms were re-established.

Updated coefficients in down-looking pyranometer.

Tsoil died at this site at around the same time as the modem went out last night. The Tsoil probe was removed for repair.

No TRH (or krypton) at this site at this time. Everything else looks OK. Cellular levels look good here: around 60% of full signal.

Nov 16

TRH at 5 dropped out for a little over an hour this morning, from 10:11 to 11:22 MST.
I don't think anyone was at the site.

Here's the raw dump:

data_dump -i 5,50 -A isfs_20101116_160000.dat.bz2 

2010 11 16 17:11:41.2109    0.98      29 TRH16 9.65 46.96 4946 1418\r\n
2010 11 16 17:11:42.1917  0.9808      29 TRH16 9.64 46.80 4945 1413\r\n
2010 11 16 17:11:43.1618    0.97      29 TRH16 9.65 46.71 4946 1410\r\n
2010 11 16 18:22:03.8285    4221      21 Ha2 = -1.382833E-6\r\n
2010 11 16 18:22:03.8585 0.03001      21 Ha3 =  3.354407E-2\r\n
2010 11 16 18:22:03.8895 0.03105      21 Ha4 =  3.666422E-5\r\n
2010 11 16 18:22:04.2285   0.339      29 TRH16 8.22 51.75 4804 1573\r\n
2010 11 16 18:22:05.1985    0.97      29 TRH16 8.22 51.72 4804 1572\r\n
2010 11 16 18:22:06.1794  0.9808      29 TRH16 8.22 51.72 4804 1572\r\n

11:20 am MST, Nov 16

From phone conversation with John and Ling:

On site: John, Kurt, Ling

When they removed the SPN1, then the aux soils started coming in. Apparently a faulty I2C device can hang the mote. Mote ID 3 serves the aux soils and spn1 at this site.

They corrected the coefficients on the the pyranometers. Rsw.in and Rsw.out look good.

prep -D Rsw.in#1,Rsw.out#1 sock:porter
2010 11 16 18:26:12.4286         95       15.6
2010 11 16 18:26:17.4287       94.2       15.4
2010 11 16 18:26:27.4291       92.6       15.1
2010 11 16 18:26:32.4293       91.8       14.9

They forgot to bring the sonic head.

TRH013 is installed.

Shadow band radiometer is now working.

Cell modem signal levels: 28-30%, -93 dB

Here is a revised table, now that some things have been fixed (and others have died):

Sites 2,3 and 4 showed dropouts last night around 09:15 UTC (02:15 MST). Data from 3 and 4 resumed about 1/2 hour later, site 2 is still out.

As of this morning we're still not getting data from 2. A host at the IP address returned for isfs2.dyndns.org responds to pings, but reports "connection refused" when ssh-ing to the special port we use. It probably isn't our system at that address.

From the system log (/var/log/isfs/messages) at site 3, the router_check.sh script detected at 09:32 UTC that it couldn't ping eol or google, and successfully power cycled the router and modem. This happened just once. Things worked like they should!

Site 4 is more complicated. The cellular connection is frequently going up and down - several times an hour, which has been going on for the last serveral days. The router detects the connection problem itself and resets the modem, the router_check.sh script is not powering things down.

I think we should try an external antenna at site 4.