Licors Installed on Turb.Tower, problems continue

18Nov09  Site Visit: CG, KK, JM

- Purpose: Install 5 Licor 7500's

- Power: We rearranged the power / batteries to accomodate the licors.   A high current/trickle/equalize battery charger was connected directly to the battery chain and not through the solar/battery charge by using the last 'external battery' amp connector.   This was because an excessive feedback impedance from the Morningstar charge controller was causing the commercial battery charger to not see the proper battery voltage preventing it from starting up to supply the loads (ie battery charger was 'too smart').   A regulated, current limiting supply wouldn't care and could be cranked up to a voltage more closely approximating solar panels (ie 14-15vdc).   There are now 3 batteries in the string.   A power distribution Tee was connected to the 'fused load' of the primary battery box with one secondary going to the Adam and the other going to the 5 Licor chain.   The licors are being powered directly because earlier tests showed that the voltage drop in our smaller gauge isfs serial cables was excessive and causing the higher-level licors to not have adequate supply voltage.   The internal solar-battery-charger is being used only as a 'low-voltage-disconnect' switch for these 2 loads.    

- Licors Installed.   The 43m,30m serial cables had been added before, so we only installed those for 2.5,7.5,15m

- Licor Ingest Problems: After installing the licors we observed many 'spurious interrupts' on the adam console.   These were caused by the licors, especially at 43, and 15m, but those were not the only ones.   At first we thought the cables may have been 'funky' and tried removing some cable ties to no avail.   When we disconnected the worst offenders, the adam was able to do a data_stats and the statistics for the licors looked ok, as did the console rserial printouts.   However the diamonds/adam was having clear difficulty.   Gordon was able to login to the system and reprogram a few of the sensors to try to slow them down to overcome these interrupts, and although at first it appeared that worked, it did not.    .... Pow-wow time.   I'm suspecting a power/serial ground issue combined with the serial driver circuit on the licors, although the diamond boards may be culpable.   It is noteworthy that there are 2 different diamond boards involved in these.   We left the system running but with the 15 and 43m licors disconnected.