Monday, March 22, 2010

CT swapped, barometer added, programming updated

A view of the PVGF1 CT, sticking up at center with cable emerging from below.

Given that this station's first CT had been deployed on March 19th, 2009, plans were made to swap it out in March of 2010.  The CT's cable was arranged in a buried conduit running from the station's electronics box to the water's edge and then along the channel's bottom to the base of the channel marker it was mounted on.  The cable was arranged in such a way that there was not sufficient slack to bring it to the surface, dry it off, and switch sensors without powering the entire system down.  Therefore we coordinated schedules to make sure we had who we needed on site to safely power down the station and verify that it had started correctly afterwards.

We also took this opportunity to add an analog barometer to the system, to settle any questions about the reliability of the barometric pressure reports from the Vaisala WXT ("weather transmitter").  And the programming was enhanced to begin storing 1-minute averages, minima and maxima as well as adding more parameters to the 6-minute data table.

In an oversight, the program was deployed with a satellite transmission platform id (PID) which has been used to test the program at AOML before deployment.  This proved to be a minor inconvenience for data processing and was corrected at the next programming update a month later.