Buoy-tastic

Here it is - attempt # 2 to make a weight that is hand-deployable, yet heavy enough to stay in one spot on the bottom. tricky, very tricky. Good thing it doesn't have to be hand-deployable by me. I can hardly lift the frame of this thing, let alone half of 150 pounds. Those gigantor chain links are HEAVY! Luckily, Tom and Ben C. could get it into the water with the help of the pulley on the A-frame - and it seemed to stay in place! Excellent. That was at Adam's Point though, several kilometres upriver from our actual research area. We'll find out soon if it'll hold out in Portsmouth Harbour...And yes, this is about as exciting as it gets for me. In fact, I think that the last post about a bag-o-milk was more interesting.

Lighthouse work

Val and I found ourselves back at the lighthouse again last Thursday and Friday. We complained about being in that dark lighthouse, soldering and splicing, while we could hear people having fun at the beach just a few hundred metres away. But then we figured that if you have to be soldering and splicing, it's better to be doing it with the sea breeze outside the door and waves washing up onto the rocks 10 feet away, rather than in the freezing cold electronics lab at CCOM (and I do mean freezing).



You may notice that there is a GPS (Global Positioning System) antenna mounted under a deck. And we're OK with it! Sure, the positioning will probably be pretty crappy, but we're not using it to find position - an additional signal that comes out of a GPS receiver is a very accurate pulse every second. For GPS to work, very precise timing is required to synchronize the satellite signals and the receivers. This works out for us because we're going to use the clever GPS timing scheme to synchronize the acoustic signals we're sending into the harbour.



Val made me take this picture of a splice we did between the GPS cable and ethernet cable. It's more impressive than it looks. Well, on second thought, it probably isn't.

Fieldwork and Trooper

The past week and a half have been pretty crazy. We started testing the pinger positioning last week at Fox Point in Newington. It's a gorgeous spot, and it was nice to work there. On Saturday, Trooper came over to CCOM to help me test the RTK GPS. His job was supervisor, but he spent most of the time chewing on his kong toy.

We finally got the RTK working, it took quite a lot of running around, downloading drivers, picking up forgotten tribrachs and trying to get the laptop to stay alive long enough to set up the receiver. ( we ended up having to use a car battery and an inverter - it worked very well)

The actual survey at Fox Point was very hectic, with the R/V Coastal Surveyor driving back and forth in front of the pier, and Tom measuring sound speed profiles continuously over nearly two hours. Below is a photo of the GPS antenna with the Coastal Surveyor in the background. It was a beautiful day and it only rained a little bit.

R/V Gulf Challenger, yeah!

Another fun day on the Gulf Challenger. It was actually very nice today, it was warm and the seas were very calm - (I suppose it's easier to have calm seas when you're on a river). I took a picture of a little sign hung up 'downstairs' in the cabin area. I thought it was funny.

I'm going to be doing my thesis project on acoustic positioning, specifically on a harbour tracking system in the Portsmouth harbour. And the Americans all want me to spell harbour wrong (harbor!!) Can you believe it? The very cover on my thesis is going to have a word spelled wrong. How can I go back to Canada? They'll never ever take me seriously! (if they ever did)