Tech Staff Meeting Notes January 3, 2007
Current Top Priorities are:Station Maintenance. (Also wish to get INV populated.)
There are four levels of priority.
| Priorities | Wish to try to get these done (or make progress on) before the next meeting (yeah right) |
| Second Tier | Fit this in too if an opportunity arises. May be good to do instead of priorities but check with Mitch. Likely to be a priority in a previous and/or subsequent month |
| As Time Permits | Fit these in when you can but not instead of first or second priorities |
| Other | Stuff we hope to get to and don't want to forget about |
This task list as of September 12, 2006. Note that everyone is still needed to work on essentially all tasks. There is however, a single person who is primarily responsible for each one. Mitch of course, is ultimately responsible for everything.
Greg's todo list is incorporated into these notes.
Fourth Annual Feast of Flesh will be Friday February 23, 2007 at 6:30
at the Butcher Shop on Germantown Road.
Holly's list of stations from 20070108: Lenox Agreement. Jim noticed the 12 year agreement for the LNXT
node is about to expire. Done.
GPS
Firstly, the radio tests in and around Tiptonville are complete. We'll
likely do a relay shot from RLAP to New Markham, and then bring both sites
back to the highschool in Tiptonville. We have permission from the school to
use their 50' tower on-site.
We'll need a second shot from our site at the Corrections Complex (NWCC) to
the highschool. For this, we'll need either a roof or building mount antenna
at at least 30' height. The MIS building itself (where out stuff is) can
give us almost twenty feet. We'll need to buy high-gain antennas and
mounting hardware, and some _serious_ lightning protection.
The second set of radio tests will be at Steele, Missouri, hopefully on
10/20. I visited this last Friday and spoke again with superintendent
Mitchell Fisher. WREG has a short mast on one side of the administration
building of the Steele schools for their weather station. I'm going to email
our contact there to see if we can mount our antenna on that mast.
The building's mechanical room has roof access and plenty of space for our
radio equipment enclosure.
Bob seems to be waiting for the results of this test before he buys radios
and antennas.
We've not been able to secure permission to get back inside the terminal
building at RLAP. To winterize the station, we need to replace the five
aircells with another solar panel, battery, and a charger that will take two
panels. Sure, we could trench AC power out to the station, but that would be
wasted effort if we _do_ get permission to move back inside. Meanwhile,
having the charger, battery, and panel hardware on-hand would be nice for
one or both of our new sites around Tiptonville.
Mitch and I are in agreement that we can't keep sponging off the seismic
networks. We'll have to buy our own stuff.
ETN
The map shows stations
with yellow triangles being new ones.
SMNC may be getting interference and the gain channel is showing up on
the vertical (but doesn't look right). Turns out its interference with
a nearby digital transmitter. Need to switch frequencies.
ANSS. Unscheduled Maintenance GNAR had a several second timing error but the DAS indicated all
was fine. Jim rebooted and it corrected itself. Weird but watch
out for this. Seisnetwatch should catch this and indicate a large
latency if the timing is out far enough.
Mitch was having problems with last 3 dm24/cmg40t tests in the test
vault. Ew2mseed kept seeing large gaps and overlaps and reallocing
memory to enormous values til eventually there was a bus error. Flushed
tanks and restarted several times in December. Flushed tanks, and verified
that dm24's were set resuse flash in FIFO mode on. They were. Cleared
the flash on the dm24 and flushed the waveserver tanks and restarted
on 20070102 and ran ew2mseed on the tanks as the data come in. So far
its working flawlessly. Will let it run over the weekend to get data
for the pdf's, then try to break it.
Second Tier Priorities
NCCU
Done.
Steiner Brain Dump Seminar
Greg is ready. Mitch acquired a voice recorder and Voice-to-text
software. Then we'll take digital photos of anything significant
on the white board. Combined, with Greg's drawings, documentation,
etc, this should make a nice searchable document. Video would be
nice but costs are prohibitive as well as effort required to
process and archive (and subsequently retrieve relevant info). FDL.
Mitch needs to talk with Horton about what to do about FDL laptops. 3890 Power
Chris is going to make a diagram for 3890. Good luck son.
As Time Permits
Mitch needs to write an ew module to monitor the environmental channels
newly installed at the nodes. Done and deployed at all nodes with the
env channels. Env_alarm runs at the nodes and sends alarm messages to
mainworm. Send_env_alarm listens for them and sends an email when it
sees one. MKTA and MTTN still need the gizmo to generate these channels.
It appears that the module (env_alarm) sends an OTMP off message on
reboot (but not on ew restart). Mitch's theory is that it takes longer
for adsend to sync to IRIG and start sending when there is a system
reboot than it does when there is just an ew restart. This causes
an apparent transition from low to high and env_alarm thinks it
is a change of state to off. Will increase time to ignore on startup.
Of greater importance is why it only sends an OTMP off instead of
one for every channel when this happens? Mitch will investigate.
Done. Al is installing. Generators
Old generator needs an exhaust pipe.
Inventory
Jim has all the broadband sensors defined and is working on additional
equipment (e.g. isis) and the connections. Mitch will install Bill's
account in mysql and inv so he can start building stations. Mitch needs
to sit down with Jim and figure out what we need to have ISTI help
us with.
Other
All hardware is in house to replace the nodes in the coming year.
We'll upgrade to ew v7.1 at the same time. This means we'll be using
scnl instead of just scn. Steve, Al, and Mitch are working on the details
(headaches) of that. Glasworm is the converter and is operational.
New switches for the scnl trace-wire are in house. Steve will install. I-40 Bridge. MPHB. Withers needs to determine current orientation so we can
pull it and orient correctly. Helicorders look strange. Need
to verify the data. Recentered, data are fine now.
VBMS. ASL crew will install sensor, das, and vsat in November.
Problems with the VSAT carrier delayed installation...the saga continues.
3904/207. Need two new power circuits in that room. There is one
free breaker in the panel. There is a single 4 outlet circuit to
the darkroom that isn't used and will be cannibalized. Chris will
make it so. One should be on the west wall. Done.
SeisNetWatch (http://webworm.ceri.memphis.edu/snw) applet wasn't
loading. Mitch installed a boot script and its working now.
There is a new chair at ASU in Jonesboro and he's interested in getting a
modern display for Laredo. Mitch is deciding what to do.
SPORADIC OUTAGES
TNMT
RELT
RDGT
MIST
MFRT
GOBM
CWPT
BRGM
WYBT
OUT
COKM.EHE
MACM.EHN
GRAT.EHE
QUAR.EHE
HARMONIC IRREGULARITY
TIPT.EHZ
BRGM.EHE
BACM.EHE
KEWM.EHE
James will coordinate with Bill or Chris when he will be going to
the field and needs assistance.
Notes from James:
station man-days status MGNC 8 done CCNC 8 new WSSR 8 new TVNC 8 new RBNC 4 done TRYN 4 done GFM 4 done SMNC 4 done (see note above) PLVA 2 abandon BHT 8 move (eventually)
Flat gap and GMT are done.
Van hill is on deck. Weren't able to get the to grade the road to
the top but it at least goes much farther up now that before.
CCRT has been acting strangely. Its now flat. Critter damage has
been repaired twice, might need a major rebuild.
Chris got an insurance letter, need to make copies and put them in the vehicles. Done.
TZTN needs a gate and have episensors swapped. The one there now belongs
to SLU. Sensor has been swapped, John will ship the the replaced one back
to SLU.
GFM has a cable problem. Will visit in the spring.
BRBC was down for a week starting 11/9 while they do work on their
internet. Its still down. Clearly the necessary time was underestimated.
Al is looking into it. Done
Chris and tbn will join John the week of Jan 22. They're deciding which
stations to hit.
Bill is getting familiarized with these so he can take them over.
GPS pods changed at ADSC and TRSC. SHTN is the only one left.
Mitch ran the code correct the leap second error.
Stations corrected are: ADSC TRSC SHTN GILT CSTN JCMO STIL HAIL SWET.
Only data between 200509040000 and 200601010000 exclusive were modified.
The sac header value kuser0 was set to "lp fix" and the code will not
modify any data that has that value (to avoid doing it twice) if it is
run again. See ~mwithers/src/fixleapsec.c for details on the mod.
CVTN and ASAR optical isolation. Need to upgrade to year 3 hardware.
Hardware ready. James brought back some
nice pictures from CVTN to help figure out how to do it (e.g. the
conduit is way too small).
John will give Bob a ring to get the new SLU shipping address (to
send back the episensor) and ask about MVKY. Done, SLU now has MVKY.
CUSEC now has business class DSL and an ip address for CUET. May need
to get a switch to hang between the dsl router and the mss100. Steve
will visit to determine hardware needs.
That leaves NAIT as the only non-real-time station. Wish to get it
online in 2007.
Several of these stations are problematic. Jim replaced that canister
on a couple and they work fine in the shop. Greg's current theory is
that there is a microscopic film of corrosion on some that forms between
the copper springs at the bottom and the aluminum canister. He surmises
that this causes some kind of goofy current or rf feedback internal to
the canister. A small movement reestablished conductivity between the
springs and canister and the problem goes away. Whatever, its all black
magic to me.
HENM
GNAR
TOPM
MLDM
CHRM
PLAR.EHE
GRAT.EHE
MCAM.EHN
BACM.EHE
TIPT.EHZ
POBM.EHZ
MORT.EHE
MATM.EHZ
DLAR.EHN
These stations have lots of glitches on them (mitch took them out of
the sta/lta trigger subnets),
ARPT
LEPT
MORT
PLAR
RDGT
STAM
WADM
I need a new list, the above is from the previous meeting. Jim reports
that the "glitchy" stations all have lower receive levels than before.
Possibly age? Or are the trees higher now? Greg presented the possibility
of nearby power line insulators that are bad. This would make arcs that
could appear as impulses. Investigation continues.
Note that a contract was let with ISTI to develope an enhanced waveserver
that allows overlaps and is more robust with gaps. This should eliminate
this sort of problem and allow use to run in adaptive mode. This
is the mode that sends current data first and back fill with oldest
unacked packets in flash as bandwidth permits.
Greg requested hot topics from everyone.
Greg will arrange and supervise regrading of HDBT. The regrading
was started and there were, shall we say, problems (more like a CF).
Hopefully the contractor will have better luck next time.
