Steve and I went back to Marshall today to address some of the problems we found yesterday and fully raise the tower.
We started by pivoting the tower back down. The battery on the generator still wasn't charged enough to start it, so we used one of the batteries from the job box. Steve brought the generator battery back to the lab to charge it. When we went to undo the bolts holding the tower vertical, the tower kept tilting as we loosened the bolts, and when we removed the bolts entirely the tower settled a couple inches out past where the bolts had been holding it. Pretty unsettling:
Steve could pivot it more upright, which means the limit switch was no longer engaged, and then we pivoted it down.
We switched the barometer cabling so it's measuring at 7m, added a quad pressure port, and covered the pressure ports and bulgin ports for the barometers on the other EC100 boxes. I swapped out a 15m bulgin for a 5m bulgin for the EC100 at 27m, and we rerouted the sonic and barometer cabling to run across and down through the rings instead of down the leg of the tower. We also flipped the plate the lowest EC100 is on, since the hook on the back looked like it was touching some of the cables in the tower. Currently that plate is just being held on with zip ties:
With that done we pivoted back to vertical and raised the tower all the way, successfully this time. Steve adjusted and tensioned the guy wires and I tidied up the bulgins now that the tower's fully extended. Everything save the power monitor was giving good data.
I took a look at some networking options since we were still waiting to hear back from NETS. The pedestal by the HAO trailer has 4 open ethernet ports, but none of them seem to be active. The pedestal near the snow gauges (that Steve looked at earlier) had 4 or 5 open ports, and when I connected my laptop to one of them I could get an IP address using DHCP, so the port must be active.
We also plugged in the USB cable from the power monitor, but couldn't get it to show up as a USB device on the DSM, though we tried a bunch of different ports. I can use the Victron app to connect over bluetooth, so hopefully it's just something wrong with the USB cable.
Steve flagged the power cable as well.
We lowered the tower before we left, but left it vertical. We loosened each of the guy wire turnbuckles by 3 turns before we lowered the tower. They probably would be fine left this way, so we installed anti-twist cable ties on the turnbuckles.
Misc notes/to do:
- Job box is now locked, bring keys if you want to get into it.
- Generator is almost completely out of gas! It'll need to be refilled before we can run it again.
- Bring the (charged) generator battery back to the trailer and reinstall it.
- Remember to take the tennis ball off the lightning protection next time we pivot the tower down (oops!)
- While removing the tennis ball, cover the 2 unused nanobarometer Bulgin connectors with caps (we didn't have any – just used tape)
- Try a new USB cable for the power monitor
- Note that the guy turnbuckles fall off of the large D rings, and may bind when next raised. CHECK THEM when near the top of raising. Probably should secure them in place with cable ties.
- Networking!