Yet another nice sunny day. Today we mostly worked at ISS3 at Sedgwick Reserve. The site is mostly in good shape thanks to Lou, Liz, and John's work there last week. Most of the equipment had remained on site since March 2020 when the first attempt at SWEX was shutdown due to the pandemic, but required quite a bit of work to get it out of the shutdown and storage state.
The major issue at the site is the 915 MHz radar wind profiler. Earlier in the week the computer had refused to boot up and it was eventually found to have a bad RAM card. Now there also is a measurement issue. This profiler is a DBS (Doppler Beam Swinging) profiler whereby the radar phased array antenna is electronically steered in 5 beam directions (one vertical and four oblique). There is a strong clutter like signal that shows up in one polarization of the vertical beam, as well as the northwest and southeast beam directions. It is not clear if the problem is with the relays that do the steering, the beam steering cables, steering codes, interface box, ribbon cable from the computer, or the software. John and Liz are investigating and will report separately.
There also appears to be an issue with the cell communications. There is a cell phone repeater, which does generate a 3-bar signal supposedly 4G/LTE however our cell phones and the cell modem had trouble connecting to it. Gary found that the model gave a better data link without the repeater (good enough for him to update the DM computer) however with the marginal cell service at the site, that is still not a good option. He is meeting with the Sedgwick network engineer on Monday and hopefully we can get a better data link.
In other tasks at ISS3, we positioned the CL31 ceilometer on the front of the trailer but are unfortunately missing a power cable. We will look for that tomorrow. We also worked on the sounding system, installed the NR01 4-component solar radiation sensor, patched together a broken RASS surround, and did other tidying up tasks.
We also transported 10 Helium cylinders to the ISS2 site.
Working the radar wind profiler and solar radiation at the Sedgwick Reserve site