This is the new view the Base station has for 2013 – with its new higher resolution webcam (this image was shrunk 50% for web speed) – the little camera board is made by e-con systems.
Base 2013 camera
Category Archives: Hardware
Tyler debugging
Tyler using our donated logic16 analyser for checking/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.
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.
Camera node deployed
A couple of weeks ago we deployed our first prototype dedicated camera node. This node is set up to take a picture every day and store them locally. This prototype was put together quickly so doesn’t have the full range of functionality that the final versions will have.
Prototype camera node deployment
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.
WiFi link is up
The network that was deployed last summer via a 16km wireless link has largely survived the winter – one dish needed some TLC in Oct and has since been replaced (whilst not strictly necessary it made sense to do it whilst we’re here). I figured what better way of testing the link than writing a blog post. So here we are, this has been written on a laptop using the aforementioned link 🙂
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…