On November 3rd, 2009 I sent out an email reporting that the station had stopped transmitting again:
The PVGF1 Port Everglades station stopped transmitting this past weekend. Its last transmission was sent at approximately 6:24pm local time on Saturday, October 31st.
I know you [Jack Stamates] were planning to visit the station after the cruise is over. You might want to involve myself or Mike Shoemaker in the trip, or possibly, one of us Mikes might want to visit the station earlier than that, if we have the ability to open the box and permission to visit the Naval Base.
I'll look to see if there are any suspicious signs in the final transmissions but it looks like it's a clean break (i.e., no gradual power loss, no partial transmissions). This may be a repeat of what happened last July. Shoe fixed things that time, I think he may have just opened up the box and power-cycled the system.
Jack responded on November 5th, 2009 with the following update:
I pulled the power plug on the Campbell and the Sat transmiter, left the power off for a 30 sec then re inserted the plug... Apparently this did not fix the problem.
Jack was able to visit the station again on November 16th, and on November 17th, 2009 I sent out the following update:
Jack visited the Port Everglades station again yesterday, and power-cycled the logger and transmitter. He also swapped out the memory cards and brought me the retrieved card. This didn't have any effect on transmissions (i.e., we are still offline, and have been since October 31st). But I now have a memory card to answer some questions about the equipment.
First off, the datalogger seems to be perfectly ok. It has been logging data nonstop since October 31st, right up until the card's retrieval yesterday.
Secondly, the transmitter is on, it is communicating with the logger, and it is continuing to acquire GPS fixes normally. However, the error codes indicate that its failsafe mode has been tripped. Basically it must have sensed conditions (voltage spike? temperature extreme?) that could have led to permanent damage, and it shut down its transmission systems. Power-cycling will NOT reset the failsafe. Instead, the "reset" button must be held down for at least 4 seconds, which will trigger a 60-second reset procedure. It is entirely possible that this is all that is needed to get the station transmitting again.
Other considerations: I currently have one other SAT-HDR-GOES transmitter, which I am testing on the roof. It is not yet working. I am also testing an updated pvgf1 logger program on the roof (among other things, this would add one of our old GE/Druck barometers, so I could sanity-check the air pressures returned by the WXT). The new logger program (unlike the spare transmitter) IS working.
The bottom line is that our next logical step should probably be to do the transmitter-reset procedure on Jack's next visit. I'd also like to visit the station to upgrade the programming and equipment, but I'm not ready yet.
Jack returned to Port Everglades and this time did a failsafe-reset on the satellite transmitter, which restarted the satellite transmissions. I sent out the following update on November 19th, 2009:
Jack did a reset of the sat-hdr-goes transmitter at Port Everglades (pvgf1), and that seems to have done the trick. We've received our first transmission from that station, with hopefully many more to come. Good work, Jack!