Category Archives: Fieldwork

working on the moraine systems

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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!

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.

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

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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 2m high snow,

Our Dacia Duster on the road back from the glacier, between walls of about 1.8m high snow.

Data retrieval

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We’ve just got back from the September trip to the glacier to do some maintenance and generally prepare the systems for the winter.  Whilst there Alex filmed us attempting (and succeeding in) getting data from the probes deployed in the summer.

Leaving to Iceland

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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. Just some of the things ready for packing

Alex and Phil drove the two cars up to Immingham with the geography support guy Peter driving another car to bring them back in.
Landy ready to go
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…