Tuesday 3rd December 2013

Today was blowing like the clappers. We had a problem with ARPANSA, one of the X-coolers which cool the gamma ray spectrometer down to minus one hundred and seventy degrees has failed. I reinitialized it yesterday and it started up again but failed again today, so I am going to have to replace it with the spare unit and in the mean time use the spare detector.

I spent a fair bit of time putting away all the project equipment that never got used and then went back to work on the tide gauge equipment. I replaced the coil cable and made a new mount for the camera and it looks terrific and is communicating well. Even the spare interface box that was reported faulty last year is working well.

I removed the old tide gauge back out of the RTA container and tested it with the repaired communications equipment and it was working fine, so all this messing about with the tide gauge for the past two years has been due to the communications equipment being faulty. Anyway, I will retrieve the data from the old tide gauge and send it back to Kingston, and continue to RTA the old tide gauge to be refurbished including new battery's and I'll activate the new one and deploy it next time we get some good weather. I prepared all the kit and packed it all away.
After work I had a chat with Paul in Broome and also with a guy in Thai Land. Tonight I worked on my blog till 1 am.

A Mawson esky