Clear and sunny again all day today across the region but cooler and breezier. Conducted a Half-IOP this afternoon and evening.
At ISS3, I enabled the Best Power 610 UPS by pressing the "UPS ON Switch" for a couple of seconds, which cycled the Load Level/Runtime LEDs and then turned off the Bypass LED and turned on the Inverter LED (see image below). This put the UPS into it's 'normal' operating mode.
Best Power 610 UPS front panel buttons and indictors.
To test the UPS, now in the correct configuration, I stopped the radar from running and unplugged the UPS's line power. The radar computer and electronics turned off again immediately as did the UPS, though it did momentarily illuminate the Battery LED indicating it tried to run off of batteries. When I reconnected the UPS to line power the UPS came on, but entered its "Bypass" mode, since the batteries did not work. If the batteries were able to carry the load I believe the UPS would revert back to its "Normal" mode of operation. With a fully depleted battery, it comes up in the "Bypass Mode" to recharge the batteries and will not connect the batteries to the load if line power is lost unless it is manually put into "Normal" mode by pressing the "UPS ON Switch" again for a few seconds. I retried this test with no load connected to the UPS and it again turned off almost immediately. So it appears that the batteries in the UPS are not charging up or holding any level of charge.
I then met Laura at ISS2 for an afternoon and evening of balloon sonde launches. The wind was already starting to come up when we launched the 4:00 pm sounding, and continued for the later soundings as well, yet we had no problems conducting the launches. We even filmed how we fill the balloon for Brigitte! There are some pretty good winds already with this Sundowner even, and more forecasted for tomorrow, so tomorrow should be an interesting day of launches.