Less than a kilometer down road SS-170 from Castel Del Monte was an agricultural research station the Centro Ricerche Bonomo.
The compound was quite large and, given the location at about 500 meters in elevation, was cool, wet, and covered with heavy vegetation.
The university in the city of Bari, about 50 kilometers away on the coast of the Mar Adriatico, already had a permanent seismic station on the grounds, so that made getting permission to put our little ol' station here pretty easy.They already knew our equipment would not cause brain cancer. Really.It is what some people thought in different places where we tried to put in stations.
In a back corner of the property were what looked like rooms where animals were kept in the past. We selected one and started the installation.
Yes, there were animals around, but that is not what it looks like in the picture below. It is just wet dirt and sand that was used to form a seal between the ground and the flowerpot over the top of the sensor.
The recorder and its entourage were placed on the other side of the room from the sensor. It was a force of habit. In the old days the old recording equipment (actually that equipment is still in use) had large hard disks that would generate mechanical vibrations that could be picked up by the sensor, so you always wanted to keep the recording equipment as far away from the sensor as possible. These recorders recorded to solid state Compact Flash "disks", so there were no moving parts to generate noise.
We did not have a lot of stuff to work with to block off the doorway to the room where the equipment was placed, so the obvious thing to do was to hijack a section of fence from the tennis court that was above the room, and a slab of marble from one of the other rooms. We wanted to keep out small animals as best we could, and especially foxes. We had to keep all of the wires up off of the ground outside the room because the foxes in the area would chew through them.
The Responsabile Amministrativo at CRB that helped us get the station installed was Savino Santovito in the first picture. Allesandro Jordan, in the second, who had been to the United States before, and whose father lived in Pennsylvania, AND who spoke great English worked in the same office with Mr. Santovito.
2018-03-03