Author Archives: Kirk
Wifi Range Test
We just carried out a quick range test on our new waveguide Wifi antenna. Kirk drove the 4×4 away from the house with Phil holding an antena out the window whilst Alex aimed the directional Wifi at the car.
It’s easy when the car is only a few hundred meters away.
By the time the car was 1.3 Km it was impossible to see it from the house but we were still picking up good signal! It should be more than good enough for communicating between the Jöklasel Cafe and the glacier.
When the car is 1.3 Km away, aiming it through the driving rain isn’t so simple…
Camera monitoring a success
automatic image taken on Aug 10th 2012 – these daily images taken with a usb webcam are useful to monitor the state of the base station, measure snow levels and observe conditions.
Leaving to Iceland
Well, the day has finally arrived! Today we head off to Iceland for deployment.
What a roller-coaster the last few weeks have been! No time to do anything except eat, sleep and breath probes, geophones, gps’s, radios and antennas! I still have to build a hardware SSN this morning, and once thats done we head off on a jetplane.
So last week we packed the Landrover and a little funny VW bus – which looked a little like a teddy bear. By the time it was filled it definitely was a fat little teddy bear packed full with GPSs, jetwash and allsorts. 
Alex and Phil drove the two cars up to Immingham with the geography support guy Peter driving another car to bring them back in.
Kirk and I meanwhile tried to get some understanding on the antenna side of things with a quick tour of the VNA (Vector Network Analyser) with Reuben. We discovered quite a few ineresting things about what we believed were good antennas, and what really were good antennas. Afterwards, Dennis Nicole helped Kirk with a little mini-VNA device which we are luckily taking with us to test antennas in the Ice.
The rest of the week we rapidly built and tested portions of the code to ensure low power sleep, scheduling and other funny things…
PCB Manufacture Started
So we have finally started PCB Manufacture
The first boards out of the oven are the new Seismic Surface Nodes which relay the geophone data to the basestation. They have connectors for two different radio modules, a usb interface and a RS-485 Controller. Here you can see them freshly baked.
First boards out the oven
The second boards out were the new CC1120 radio boards. Here you can see them being cooked in the oven. Jess thinks they look like little pizzas! Yum!
The new radio boards in the oven
AGU Environmental Sensor Network conference call is now open
Once again we are helping to run a conference session at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. Abstract submissions are now open on ESN’s and informatics.