On January 13th, 2011, I wrote:
Jack and I visited the station this morning. The entire base (?) lost power for a week over new year's, Dec 27th to Jan 3rd. [This was apparently due to a disastrous FP&L screwup. Jack knows/understands more of the details of this.]Note that while Jack and I were visiting, we again downloaded all available ADCP data and swapped datalogger memory cards, an operation that normally occurs about once a month.
The station batteries performed beautifully and everything continued to operate normally (ADCP, CT, logger, WXT) except the sat transmitter. So we lost no data whatsoever. Jack was thrilled with this test of the station's operation during an extended power loss. Great design!
The one weak point continues to be the ancient satellite transmitter. At the battery levels recorded by the logger, even the transmitter should have continued to operate normally. But something about those slightly-lower voltage levels, or possibly there were repeated voltage drops or spikes, something spooked the transmitter. It was NOT in failsafe mode (I could see that when I connected directly to the transmitter) but it had stopped communicating with the logger, so it had no data to transmit. Pushing the failsafe-reset button seems to have brought it back to life. Remember, this is one of those old SAT-HDR-GOES transmitters, the last one (of five original) that still works at all.
Mike J+