Tech Staff Meeting Notes March 13, 2007

Current Top Priorities are:Station Maintenance. SLU stations. (Also wish to get INV populated.)

There are four levels of priority.
PrioritiesWish to try to get these done (or make progress on) before the next meeting (yeah right)
Second TierFit 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 PermitsFit these in when you can but not instead of first or second priorities
OtherStuff 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.

Priorities

Station Maintenance, NMSZ
Jim noted that the /stations page is out of date and in several cases, wrong
The signal strength at lnxt and mkta is deteriorated which could be causing alot of the problems in the bad channel list. The transmitter at sftn for the mkta analog backbone was replaced.
The receivers are drifting and we need a wholesale general retuning.
Bad Channel List 20070206:
Channel is Out
GRAT.EHE
MCAM.EHN
CPAR.EHZ
QUAR.EHE
Sporadic Outages
CHRM
RDGT
HOVM
BFAR
DLAR
COKM.EHE
BROM.EHE
Drifting/Harmonic Problem ?? (Magically dissappeared, I hate it when that happens).
DLAR.EHE
TIPT.EHZ
BRGM.EHE

SLU BB Stations. Little Rock week of 3/19. Poplar Bluff and Martin next. Should take about 3 days each. The 4th near Springfield, MO is permitted but needs to be sited. Need to get all this done by the end of April. So no crying about the rain.

Lenox Agreement. Should be ok. Its wait and see for now.

GPS
Planning to purchase new receivers for all stations (some are quite old). Done.
Steele is now on AC.
(NWCC) We'll be making a wireless radio shot with two Freewaves, the base at the Tiptonville Highschool and the slave at the prison. The radio can go into the existing GPS enclosure, while we'll mount the antenna on a tripod on the roof of the MIS building. Chris and James are working on a shopping list for parts. At the highschool, we'll install a Freewave antenna and coax onto their sixty-foot tower. The coax will be run into the shop classroom and into a radio enclosure placed high enough to be out of reach. School maintenance has offered whatever help we might need, including running power and Cat-5. This is part of the "getting-sites-in-Lake-county-online" scheme using Freewaves to relay data back to the highschool.
The plan is still to repeat RLAP through New Markham (tenatively being called NMKM). We won't know for certain if the beacon tower will allow us a straight shot to Tiptonville until we can do radio tests when the trees are fully foliated. Moving our receiver enclosure to the beacon tower means trenching new coax for the antenna. This will likely be hard-line with lightning arrestors on both ends. The old electric drop to the tower is corroded and unusable. We'll be using solar, here. Bob's also mentioned placing both the enclosure and solar panel high enough up the tower to deny the curious quick access, perhaps eight or so feet.
NMKM was already go, but now the second new site in Tiptonville has been located at the highschool. The next step is up to Bob and John-Paul - installing the deep drill-brace monuments. After that's done, the receivers and other stuff can go in.

ETN

Station Maintenance

SMNC frequencies were changed. There is an additional problem. What is it?
CCRT has a large dc offset (permanently in the lowest gain setting) which causes trace to appear flat unless data are visually magnified. Also causes premature saturation on one side. Unfortunately the park is closed until April.
TZTN needs a gate and the gps antenna swapped. Have the antenna.
GFM has a cable problem. Will visit in the spring.
Have some Lexan and batteries to give John.
MGNC appears to be experiencing some kind of interference.
The MYNC.US saga continues. Meremonte suspects the VSAT gateway. He's sending the entire stack for swap. John will need to flash the DRU with the DW4020 firmware and replace the stack.

Network Completion

The map shows stations with yellow triangles being new ones.
stationman-daysstatus
MGNC8done
CCNC8new
WSSR8new
TVNC8new
RBNC4done
TRYN4done
GFM4done
SMNC4done (see note above)
PLVA2abandon
BHT8move (eventually)

ANSS.
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).
NAIT is the only non-real-time station. Wish to get it online in 2007. Might be able to hit Richardson from there.

Routine Maintenance Kudzu, battery check, etc, etc.

Second Tier Priorities

Steiner Brain Dump Seminar Marathon week while John was in Memphis. Completed 12 sessions so far. Can fit 1 hr/dvd and each dvd is 4.5 GB. Have about 12.5 hours so far. Would be nice to get these online. How public should they be?

FDL. Got the new laptops. These are the rules:
They will all be configured exactly the same. Old laptops will be obsolesced NOT retasked. Each of the new ones will have a primary purpose (though if they're all the same, they should be able to fill all other purposes in a pinch):

  1. Aftershock deployments
  2. Environmental Geophysics Class
  3. Sundry other field work (e.g. mag, grav, etc)
  4. Bench
Presumably 1 and 4 could be secondary for each other and 2 and 3 could be secondary for each other.
Horton's laptop has all the necessary software. Need to pry it from is icy grip and extract the software and configs to the new laptops.
Two or three 6td's aren't working. Not sure whether its a config problem, cable problem, or sensor problem. Bill is investigating and returning all the rest to deployable status.
Steve will acquire a lacie pocket drive. If these can be made to work the same as the gizmos from guralp, he'll get another. The first will be for Bill's exclusive use (i.e. don't even let those pesky scientists know it exists else they'll want to take it into the field).
More requests to check-out magnetometer. What about software?
Seems to be resistance to check-out/in forms/procedures. Once we have all this in place, Mitch will be the hammer. There shall be no exceptions (not even Mitch and tech staff). This shall be true whenever something comes off the shelf whether its going to another State for deployment or just to another building at CERI.

3890 Power Chris is going to make a diagram for 3890. Good luck son.

As Time Permits

Generators Since P-plant doesn't seem to be helping maintain anymore, Bill is now the generator guy. As a start, he'll run the old generator monthly.

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 node computers 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. Done.

I-40 Bridge.
Wound up doing regrading with significant manual assist. Need an eight inch extension for the surface vault.
Pumped the water out of the holes. Found sixty feet of sand in the 200 foot hole. This was done to weight down casing during install and never removed. Doh! Driller will remove it.
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. Chris is arranging to have a fence installed (after any pad, gravel or whatever is installed). Cost is $1100 installed (must be real silver). We don't want to do it ourselves since it has to tie into the existing dilapidated fence.

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. VSAT issues resolved. Install planned for March or April.

Brent Rosenblad from Mizzou (?) wishes to perform active source reflection profiles at 8-10 sites again this year.