Here Phil is installing a new Wifi link to the moraine smart-camera system. Incredibly this “cantenna” can link directly to the Holmur Wifi 16km away! We don’t expect perfect connectivity but even occasional link-up will push the images to the web server in the UK.
The only advantage of light rain on the glacier today…
We are installing a Geophone sensor node 4m in the ice – it took a lot of drilling by a combined effort with this hand-drill!
The base station endured a severe winter again – but with more snow (which even covered the wind generator). This bent the struts a lot (and they are not easy to bend!) so we are reinforcing with scavenged parts. Phil is seen here writing notes on the state of the base station. The wind was very strong and we had to tie down anything which could fly away (Graeme’s glasses did fly away though!)
this automatic time-lapse camera should take photos of the glacier using a normal logitech webcam. The Beagle-based system survived the whole winter on its two big batteries but the day we left it in october its waterproof usb plug lost connection sadly. It is now set up so we should see the melting of the snow revealing our equipment hopefully!
we have so many batteries in the dGPS cases we’re investigating using a small petrol generator to charge them after they lost all charge over the winter. Phil is in the background testing the webcam node.
Phil setting up a new dipole antenna to try communications with the subglacial probes
This was taken since last october (2012) and shows the incoming snow, melting etc.
We are back in Iceland on June 6th – rather early for the snow it seems!
The snow on the moraine and road was very deep. Here you can just see the top of the GPS antenna (which is on a tripod!) and the camera.
after a lot of digging we reached the dGPS box so we could copy the data
we usually use the ladder to get up to the balcony where our reference station lives – but there was so much snow we could just walk up!
The panel wifi antenna had self-destructed but the long range WiFi was still ok.
Glacier Jeeps emailed me this photo taken on Feb 9th 2013 which shows the large quantities their building of snow gets! Some of our gear is buried!
Thanks to the daily camera image from the base station’s webcam we can see that the snow is starting to settle on the glacier.
base station webcam image from oct 31 2012