American Samoa had a college. A community college. It appeared to be tied in with an agricultural research center. It was once a missionary school of the Mormon church.
We showed up on a Saturday and looked through the research center building until we found one of the staff and asked permission to look around. We were on the prowl for a place to locate a station.
In the far back corner of the property was a pig sty.
Strangely enough there were pigs in the sty...great big ones. Since this was in one of the corners of the grounds it was thought that this would be the quietest spot for a station. The exact place was straight into the picture above. We found out that there was just one vehicle once a day coming to the area to tend to the pigs, and the occasional "oink" creating noise to contend with.
Another possible place we thought might be good was near the green houses. We thought it would have been really convenient to have put the sensor on the far side of this building, put the recoding equipment box inside the building, and just run the cables under the wall between it and the cement slab. Then we found out that the buildings like this one are sometimes dismantled before tropical cyclones. Plan B?
We wandered all over the grounds.
Nice place, but it was a bit too steeped in civilization. This area was on the edge of the large, flat part of Tutuila. The main highway was nearby, and the bulk of the island's population was within about 10 miles of here. After driving every road on the island we came to the conclusion that if the station we ended up installing on Tutuila did not work out this would probably be the location it would be moved to. The officials were quite nice, and were excited about the prospect of putting our site there.
2014-08-03