station goes offline, and is revived (redux)

On July 21st, 2011, we stopped by the station by boat on our way to visiting some other FACE ADCP sites, and Jack jumped in to have a closer look at the ADCP and CT.  Partly he wanted to see if there were any obvious explanations for the ADCP's loss of communications, and partly he wanted some context for drawing up a plan to remove both sensors later on.  Once we returned to the lab, I noticed that the station's transmitter had failed again only the afternoon before.  I sent out this update:

Weird timing on this one -- I didn't realize while you were examining the Port Everglades CT and ADCP this morning that the station had stopped transmitting yesterday afternoon.  I guess there wasn't anything we could have done about it today anyhow even if we'd known, not without clearance from the Navy to approach the box on land.

The station's last transmission was at 1800 hours UTC yesterday, or 2pm local time.

From the diagnostics it looks to me like another transmitter failure.  Doing the failsafe reset might bring it back online.  Another option is to try swapping it with the SAT-HDR-GOES transmitter I recently recovered from Molasses Reef, which was still functional at the time of its recovery.

Jack returned (by land) to Port Everglades on August 8th, 2011 and his transmitter reset brought the station back online as I reported by email:

Jack made it out to Port Everglades this morning and punched the reset button on the transmitter.  In response the station has made one transmission so far (that's all it's had time for) so I am cautiously optimistic that we are live again, at least for the time being.

I later followed up with on August 10th, 2011, with more details about the diagnostics reported by the transmitter while offline:

I've already mentioned this to Jack, but in case anyone else is interested in the Port Everglades data, it's all been extracted and that missing month of data has been patched.  Files and spreadsheets are available in the usual places, feel free to ask if you want a pointer to anything specific.

And yes, the data show that the transmitter really was in failsafe mode.  This was possibly caused by an excess of GPS-acquisition-related errors in the time leading up to the failure.  As of this writing the station has been transmitting okay for just over two days in the time since Jack's visit.

data downloads, 2011

Between an on-site intervention to bring the satellite transmitter back online on January 13th, 2011 and this station's significant swapout/reinvention on October 20, 2011, FACE continued their routine of (roughly) monthly visits for downloading the ADCP's data reserves and swapping datalogger memory cards.  These visits gave us semi-regular access to ADCP data, which weren't included in the station's near-real time transmissions, allowed us to "patch" holes in our archives where occasional transmissions had been dropped, and gave us access to the more time-granular (5-second, 30-second, 1-minute, 6-minute) stored data that weren't included in the hourly transmission.

Between January 13th and October 20th, 2011, these data-download visits took place on:

• February 2nd, 2011
• March 4th, 2011
• May 17th, 2011
• June 30th, 2011
• August 8th, 2011