Day Four
Apologies for the late posting. Unfortunately the link to the internet from EISCAT went down and remained so until today (1/10/2005). This meant that we had no internet and no communication with the remote sites and no real time data displays. The Finns did run last night starting at 18:30 UT though it was quite cloudy for the first few hours. However, at about 10pm local time the cloud lifted and there was some beautiful aurora. More on that in a minute.
It had been very cloudy and grey all day and the weather didn't make the news any easier to take; it seems that the optimism in the VHF working was misplaced. When Roger said that all the bits work so it should work, it seems that he was wrong. The whole thing on its own does not work. They will try fixing it on Monday. Thomas seems to think that it will work on one antenna, so I guess he has spoken to someone more recently than I have. The UHF has had lots of problems today, I'm not sure what, but Roger said that it was working "unstably".
Martin Blixt and Bjorn Gustaffson called in on their way to Skibotn and gave us a digital recorder for the camera for studying black aurora. Unfortunately Andrew discovered some problems with camera leads. Seems we have a 50 ohms lead and need a 75 ohms. However, it does seem to work okay. Though Andrew has had to split the signal from the camera between the monitor and the recorder since we do not have the cables to link the monitor on after the recorder. There is also some sort of echo on the playback of the tapes (very small) and we are not sure whether this is a function of the playback since it is different when the data is being recorded.
Tero told us that the Finnish photometer went kaput. The weather forcast says rain and cloud for the next few nights. So far this campaign seems to be a little cursed.
Andrew intends to cancel Saturday's DROP and the Finns cancelled their experiments for Saturday.
It had been very cloudy and grey all day and the weather didn't make the news any easier to take; it seems that the optimism in the VHF working was misplaced. When Roger said that all the bits work so it should work, it seems that he was wrong. The whole thing on its own does not work. They will try fixing it on Monday. Thomas seems to think that it will work on one antenna, so I guess he has spoken to someone more recently than I have. The UHF has had lots of problems today, I'm not sure what, but Roger said that it was working "unstably".
Martin Blixt and Bjorn Gustaffson called in on their way to Skibotn and gave us a digital recorder for the camera for studying black aurora. Unfortunately Andrew discovered some problems with camera leads. Seems we have a 50 ohms lead and need a 75 ohms. However, it does seem to work okay. Though Andrew has had to split the signal from the camera between the monitor and the recorder since we do not have the cables to link the monitor on after the recorder. There is also some sort of echo on the playback of the tapes (very small) and we are not sure whether this is a function of the playback since it is different when the data is being recorded.
Tero told us that the Finnish photometer went kaput. The weather forcast says rain and cloud for the next few nights. So far this campaign seems to be a little cursed.
Andrew intends to cancel Saturday's DROP and the Finns cancelled their experiments for Saturday.
posted by Kav at 4:46 pm
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