Troubleshooting with Duct Tape

March 13, 2006

James: Hello again from Alaska ! This morning I woke up with optimistic hopes that we would get some good data.  The good news was that the transmitter was turning on.  After breakfast and some emailing, Dr. Herman and I went out to the theatre to get ready.  I got suited up with the Ohm Mapper and we got our bear guide and we were off to the ice.  Everything seemed to be going perfect.  I walked 300 meters, the length of the survey, and we were getting data.  I was excited.  As I was strapped in to the array, Dr. Herman pulled the tail around to start going back down the line.  I started the receiver up and almost immediately I lost signal from the transmitter.  Dr. Herman went and checked and sure enough it had turned itself off.  I wasn’t nearly as disappointed as yesterday because we were making progress.  Today we had taken data although not much.

We brought everything back into the theatre and headed off to the cafeteria for lunch.  After lunch, Dr. Herman went of to check on the transmitter.  We were getting a loner from Geometrics which was great news.  I had an hour to relax after lunch while Dr. Herman was probably running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying desperately to make sure our trip was successful.  I met up with Dr. Herman and suggested we go ahead and try to make some changes to the transmitter to alleviate the stress.  I talked to Glenn Sheehan about getting some supplies and he pointed me in the direction of a hardware store in town.  How perfect!  A hardware store that is within walking distance.  I headed down there and picked up some wire and supplies.

The idea was to manually wire the batteries into the transmitter in order to completely eliminate any pressure between the contacts of the transmitter and the batteries.  I got it wired and duct taped up (No physics project is complete without some duct tape).  The transmitter turned on, but that didn’t tell me much.  After all, the transmitter had come on fine last night and this morning.  The test was out on the ice.  Dr. Herman, the bear guide, and I headed out yet again to give this another try.  We decided to start the survey over from the begging for consistency.  We started up the survey, no problems.  I got down to the end of the 300 meter survey, no problems.  We turned the array around and walked all the way back down again.  I walked extremely slow in order to increase the data density.  Walking 300 meters takes about 20-25 minutes.  Real slow.  I truthfully thought that everything was going to work out this time.  After all, I had fixed the problem.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  Halfway into the second line the unit flashed an error message that it was again not receiving data from the transmitter.

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