The next day the problem of buildings and trees getting in the way of GPS signals was completely solved by moving everything out to the lawn area in front of the geosciences building.
June is near the end of the rainy season in Bogotá. Unfortunately it was not close enough to the end. There was a light rain on and off most of the day.
We only had enough batteries at the university to set up and test about half of the systems at one time. For security reasons we could not leave everything running out in the open overnight, so we ran an abbreviated test and tested the recorders in two groups for about four hours each. That was long enough to make sure that the GPSs would lock up several times (they try to get a signal lock once an hour) and that any gross timing problems with the recorders would show themselves. For over four years I have been traveling around the planet hauling these stupid shipping cases back and forth and no one has ever thought of carrying the cases like in the picture above. You can not get much more efficient.
Training training. Many of the people from the electrical engineering, geology and geosciences departments that were going to be involved with the deployment of the instruments came by during the day and were trained by Eliana and the other students.
The students and faculty took turns babysitting the equipment throughout the day. The equipment was all waterproof, but the people were not.
As we waited for the end of the last group of instruments to finish we had a box of milk. It did not taste like milk, exactly, but it WAS in a box just like you find milk in when shopping in foreign countries. Whatever it was it tasted pretty good. As far as I remember.
The following day Eliana took everyone through the procedure of downloading the data that was recorded during the tests.
Connect the SCSI cable, connect the power, download the data to the laptop, disconnect the power, disconnect the SCSI cable. Connect the SCSI cable, connect the power, download the data to the laptop, disconnect the power, disconnect the SCSI cable... Gustavo was an expert by the end of the morning.
When the downloading and processing training was finished I showed them a few things to be aware of inside the recorders if they appeared to fail.
2018-03-05