Tyler using our donated logic16 analyser for checking/debugging
Tyler debugging
Working on the 2013 base station
Here you can see the new shape of the 2013 base station – without wind generator (extra solar panels instead), new panel Wifi antenna on the top, new camera just below that and Topcon dGPS on the very top now. The structure has been reinforced with recovered parts from the damaged and decommissioned GPS pyramid.
Adding Wifi to the moraine camera
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.
Rainbow over the Skafellsjokul glacier
The only advantage of light rain on the glacier today…
2008 Wired probe recovered
For the last few years we have seen more and more of the lead for the 2008 wired probe be exposed due to surface melt. We were hoping that this year for the first time in Iceland we’d be able to recover it. When we arrived this year we found the lead going into a stream on the surface of the glacier, and with a bit of wiggling Graeme (shown below) was able to extract the probe.
Graeme with a wired probe from 2008 which has been recovered.
We’re looking forward to being able to open it up and see how well it has survived.
Drilling for the new Geophone nodes
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!
Fieldwork August 2013
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!)
working on the moraine systems
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.
White-out
We’ve returned from the mountain very early today as whilst we could actually drive to our usual parking space we could only see about 3 meters. So we’ve come back to the farm to charge some batteries and do other jobs.
Our Dacia Duster on the road back from the glacier, between walls of about 1.8m high snow.
On the Glacier in June 2013
Phil setting up a new dipole antenna to try communications with the subglacial probes