I did have to do a little work while I was there. The goal was to distribute ten sensor and recorder systems across the northern portion of the Qinghai Province. We did more than 3000 kilometers of driving to accomplish it. As is usually the case, the first thing we did after the equipment arrived in Xining was a huddle test.
For the huddle test all of the equipment was unpacked in one area and hooked up just as would be in the field. This gave us a chance to make sure nothing was damaged during the shipment from the U.S., allowed us to figure out how much extra stuff would have to be purchased locally in order to get the systems up and running, and gave the people going into the field some training time on the equipment and some time to practice working with the equipment.
The green items at the top of the picture above were Streckheisen STS2 sensors. They are quite sensitive and pretty robust when it comes to dragging them from a nice, safe, clean laboratory out into the field. The gray box on the left was the recorder, a Reftek 72-07. The black item was a battery, and the yellow box was a charge controller which handled keeping the battery charged up. The battery was there to supply power to the recorder and sensor if the main power source (commercial or solar) went down for up to about a week.
The sensors and the recorders were installed indoors, but the clocks, which use the satellites for accurate timing signals, had to be installed outside to receive the signals from the satellites. At least one of the sites was set up using solar panels for power.
Each recorder had at least a one gigabyte internal disk drive for the data to be recorded on. That allowed for up to two months of recording before someone would have to visit each site, stop the recording, copy the data from the disk, erase the old data, and start the recording again. It was planned to make one of these "service runs" about every month. The data from each site would be copied to a laptop computer, and when the service run was finished it would all be written to tape and sent off for analysis.
2018-03-05