Our last visit to the station in Maota was to implement a "cyclone upgrade".
The equipment was a little exposed to the elements and there was a pretty real possibility of the station being carried away by a tropical cyclone. While I wouldn't have complained about having to go to Tahiti to look for the equipment after a storm I figured it was more prudent to keep everything from getting there in the first place. Call me responsible.
We pounded some holes in the rock and cement mound we originally built and refilled the holes with cement and chain.
The solar panels were originally only attached with plastic tie wraps to the wood supports, so we used some of our leftover plywood from the Asau site and instead bolted everything together.
Much better. The only difficulty was getting at all of the bolts that attached the plywood to the solar panels to tighten them, then getting at all of the bolts that attached the solar panels to the wooden frame pieces to tighten them. Everything was on the bottom of the assembly and the 2x3 frame pieces were permanently attached to the cement piers.
Since we covered up some of the names we wrote into the first layer of cement we had to rewrite them in the new layer. It was the day before Thanksgiving. An unknown holiday in Samoa.
The tarp was just to keep the direct sunlight off of the station box like in Ta'u. What a Christmas present, eh?
The whole idea of the chains weren't to keep the station running through a storm, but just to keep all of the pieces in the area so they could be put back together after the storm.
Larry (Tapu) took some angle iron that we bought and built a nice gate for the site with a welder and some scrap fencing while we were concentrating on Asau. The idea of the fence for this site, like the one in Asau, was not to keep people out, but just to let them know that something was there.
2014-07-24