12/22/2003: 2 Reftek sites deployed after San Simeon main shock.
PRWD: Installed
WSRV: Installed
12/23/2003: 2 more reftek sites and a Q330 site deployed
CPL: Installed
PRCP: Installed
AFS1: Installed
12/26/2003: Aaron makes first site visit of Reftek stations. All the systems were running, but the rains of the previous days caused the velocity transducers to tilt. This will render much of the velocity data unusable for many tasks. Luckily, the FBAs were all mounted on concrete slabs, so the data from those should be good.
01/09/2004: Aaron and Craig make second site visit run. Two additional sites are installed and a third examined.
SLCC: Installed. Site is in the basement of the San Luis Obispo community center. Standard GPS cables for the reftek are not long enough to reach to any secure location outside. GPS is locked before ACQ started. Will be able to add GPS using a longer (~40') cable
SSCB: Installed. Due to the high visibility of the site, the pullout right next to the site and the high level of traffic, the choice was made to not leave anything other than the Brooks box exposed. That means that this site will not have any solar panels to recharge the batteries.
PRCP: Unable to attain access to PRCP, so no data was collected there.
AFS1: Powered up when the terminal was plugged in and had recorded no events. The site had shutdown and not woken up. Most likely the reason it didn't wake up was problems with the internal batteries. Even though the battery voltage had appeared higher on 12/26/03 than during the install, the charger was apparently not quite keeping up with the DAS. The Radio Shack power supplies that we are using are not outputting at full capacity. We seem to only be getting about 1/5th of the max. We are guessing that the switching power supply in the Radio Shack system is "fighting" with the input switching of the solar charge controller. Monitoring current draw shows very rapid fluctuations. So unfortunately these systems may not work as a long term solution. Its also unclear if there may be a problem with the GC31 AH battery at that site. The DAS was power cycling before the LVD would have shut anything down. Luckily, the battery was fully charged when the site was visited, so even if the charger is not keeping the battery fully charged, it should at least extend its range to a week or so.
01/16/2004: Aaron, Kenichi and Shou make third site visit. Trigger ratios on all Reftek sites for both streams were dropped pretty significantly to 8 (from 12 and 15 for strong and weak motion respectively). This choice was made due to the declining rate of activity and the small number of false triggers that have been seen.
SLCC: Was up and running, a GPS unit was set on the roof and connected up. We did not get a lock in a timely fashion, so we used another GPS at ground level and locked the DAS with that. We then installed that GPS (because it was known to work) in place of the GPS (unknown status) on the roof. We waited a couple minutes for a lock, but decided we needed to proceed. The 40' cable was built and tested at the lab in the past week and found to work.
SSBC: was one of our more encouraging sites. It was up and running, the batteries had only dropped to 12.16VDC and the clock had successfully locked through the Brooks box lid!
WSRV: Apparently, our sensor problems at WSRV have been caused by wierdness in DAS 0593. Channel 4 was again very noisy (19K counts). I thought it highly unlikely that this sensor which had cal'ed well in the lab would exhibit the same problem as the previous sensor. Disconnecting the input, the signal looked similar in form, but was of normal amplitude. The L4 cable was swapped and it looked like that took care of it for a couple minutes. Luckily we continued testing and saw that channel 4 started doing the same thing again. At that point, we replaced DAS 0593 with DAS 1043. The good: our sensors are not all as bad as I had been thinking. The bad: the data from this site till this swap may be very problematic to work with.
PRCP: We were able to access PRCP this visit (were unable to gain access to the site on site visit 2). Unfortunately, it looks like that site had problems very similar to that of AFS1 on site visit 2, which means that we have no data for two weeks on that site. The DAS said that it had two events, but there didn't seem to be any data blocks in memory or on the disk, so somehow that data is lost. Like AFS1 from the previous visit, the battery was recharged to an operational level. The RadioShack charger was swapped with one of the powersonic chargers and parameters were reloaded.
PRWD: routine visit.
AFS1: routine visit.
01/23/2004: Aaron services AFS1, PRCP, PRWD, WSRV and SLCC while Jamie and Kenichi service the sites near Cambria (SSCB and CPL). Got permission to run sites AFS1, PRCP, WSRV and PRWD for up to another month. The lowering of the trigger ratios seems to have worked well after looking at the associated data and plotting the association on the timeline. We have gotten quite a few events that have been detected on multiple sites.
AFS1: routine visit.
PRCP: Heard the DAS click on when the terminal was connected. Nevera a good sign. DAS came up in ACQ on with -SCI. I though initially that there was a problem with a SCSI dump and that the system had then shut down. Swapped out the SCSI cable and reset the DAS. This seemed to fix the -SCI status. But while continuing to service the site, kept losing comm to DAS. Noticed a clicking during one of those losses and realized that the DAS is rebooting at random times. The event counter indicated 14 events, but there was no data on disk and no data in memory. One possibility is that the DAS is seeing some problem in memory and clearing it tyring to fix it (have seen this happen on a few occasions before). Will have to do some testing on the bench to see if this is whats happening. Pulled DAS 0717 and installed DAS 0631 at site.
PRWD: routine visit. Battery was at 12.75, which is a bit low, but the charger seems to be working and the site has been fine so far. An inspection of the logs shows that the voltage as stayed pretty steady. Should just keep an eye on the battery status at visits.
WSRV: routine visit.
SLCC: routine visit.
01/29/2004: Aaron and Catherine visit the six reftek sites. All were routine visits. Checked levelling of all buried L4 sensors.
SLCC: routine visit. Taped gps cable to ceiling. It had slack in it that was not there before. Most likely someone caught the cable and dragged the gps on the roof. Time lock was OK though.
SSCB: routine visit.
PRCP: routine visit.
PRWD: routine visit. Changed battery since it seems to be getting lower every visit. Tightened contacts on charger and cleaned up contacts on battery end of the charger cable.
WSRV: routine visit.
AFS1: routine visit.
02/05/2004: Aaron and Catherine visit the two CSUN sites and SSCB.
JEFF: Only a handful of triggers on this site. It's a 16 bit das with gain set to 1 and an L28. We updated the params to more closely match the other Reftek sites as well as raised the gain to 32. We also set the trigger ratio a bit lower because of the L28 sensor (6) instead of the 8 on the other sites. Should consider putting an L4 on the site.
SSCB: Mostly a routine visit. The batteries had gotten to the point that the disk wouldn't spin. Had -SCI on display and RAM was full with DAS in ACQ STRT OFF. Swapped batteries and reset DAS, this caused the RAM to dump tothe disk before we proceeded. From looking at the log files after dumping data, it filled almost exactly 24 hours before the site visit.
HERB: Updated parameters to more closely match the rest of the array. Used trigger ratio of 7 to be somewhere in between what Gerry had and what we have been using (8).
02/12/2004: Aaron and Catherine visit all the reftek sites except the two CSUN installed sites which were visited on the last site visit. All were routine visits. Checked L4 sensor level on all sites visited except for PRWD.
SLCC: routine visit. Tape holding gps cable to ceiling had come undone. Rerouted cable to run closer to ceiling.
SSCB: routine visit.
PRCP: routine visit.
PRWD: routine visit. Changed battery on this visit as well. Either the site is drawing more than the charger is outputting, or the charger is not outputting at full rate.
WSRV: routine visit.
AFS1: routine visit. L4 was slightly out of level. About 1/3 of bubble was outside of circle. Re-leveled.
02/19/2004: Catherine visits SSCB to swap batteries
SSCB: routine visit.
02/28/2004: Catherine visits SSCB to swap batteries
SSCB: Some flooding in brooks box. Dug out the hole a bit more.
03/04/2004: Jamie pulls CPL and SSCB. Aaron and Catherine pull SLCC, PRCP, WSRV and PRWD sites as well as do site visits on AFS1, HERB and JEFF.
SLCC: Routine check. Site pulled.
AFS1: Routine visit. Site left for Gerry Simila who wants to run some sites a bit longer.
PRCP: Routine check. Site pulled.
WSRV: Routine check. Site pulled.
PRWD: Routine check. Site pulled.
HERB: Routine check.
JEFF: DAS was not seeing GPS. Inspection of the cable revealed obvious mashing of cable right at the strain relief on the GPS end of the cable. This was a CSUN gps->comm cable. We did not have a spare for replacement and no repair equipment since we were essentially on a site pull run. Bared the two completely broken wires and twisted them together. Taped cable to dust cover of GPS unit as strain relief. DAS was then able to see GPS. We did not wait for GPS lock as there was nothing more that we could do for it and the cable really needs replacement ASAP. I expect the twisted wires will corrode pretty quickly.
SSCB: No communication with DAS. Charge controller was submerged in mud, causing power problems. Site apparently down since last visit. Site pulled.
06/19/2004: Gerry services remaining sites
AFS1: Had problems communicating with DAS, pull site and drop off at UCSB