Sorry for the long delay but we have been having really touchy internet for a while and I haven’t been able to get anything to upload onto the site. Because of that I have just been adding little paragraphs of new things happening here every few days when I try to post an entry but that entry is now quite long and rambling so I will separate it into several smaller bits. I have also taken out all of the photographs I had intended to include and will try to upload them separately, once our connection is better, or once we get back to shore…whichever one works first. So here goes.
Things have been moving right along here. We have been mapping the bottom of the sea floor for over a week now and are almost finished covering the small section we were targeting. This has really been one of the first times I have seen the nature of the troubleshooting aspects of this marine tech position and its importance. Before I go any further I feel the need to say that there have been other instances of troubleshooting and problem solving over the course of these last few months to be sure but none have really been as make-or-break as some of the issues faced during this particular run. Keep in mind that it took us about 10 days to get out to our work site. 10 days of nothing but sailing to the destination in the middle of the Pacific. If things don’t work out here we can’t just stop back in the harbor and pick up parts or a different machine or whatever. It pretty much has to work. So right away when we get on station the very first thing the scientists have planned is 6-8 full days of mapping the seafloor using their multibeam system named Homeside. They put it into the water and started lowering it down as the ship moved slowly ahead (the idea is that it be towed quite a long way behind the ship and fairly deep…both in the 1000’s of meters) and it was immediately clear that there was a communication error somewhere. The scientists weren’t getting any data from Homeside. Enter the marine technician. After some extended searching and troubleshooting it became clear that the device was working and communicating with the ship so Trevor (said technician) starting looking at the settings and parameters entered into the system. Sure enough…after a covering a lot of ground in relatively complex operating software he found one pulldown option that needed to be adjusted and voila!…the scientists were connected to the device.
Next, the issue was that the information they were getting was not good. Basically the Homeside system was communicating with the ship’s system and the ship system then transferred the information down to the scientists. The problem was that the signal the ship was sending out and the signal the scientists could receive weren’t the same format. That may not seem like a difficult issue to correct but it certainly was. We needed a format that was compatible for the ship and Homeside to be able to receive and transmit data correctly and wow did it take a long time to figure it out. We (and by we I really mean Trevor) found a few different places where new settings could be configured. Trial and error for a couple of hours and bingo…finally the scientists had the right information coming in. Whew.
There were a few more mishaps and technical difficulties but I won’t rehash them all. The other issues were either relatively small corrections or issues with the Homeside itself. The whole point of this entry is really just to emphasize the importance of good troubleshooting skills out here in such a unique environment. The Homeside was scheduled to operate for DAYS of this trip…one third of the scientific data collection time. Even though the issues that came up turned out to be things that were correctable after a few hours of troubleshooting, had they not been it could have been disastrous for this cruise and for the science team. This absolutely had to work and Trevor the tech is the one that saved the day.
OK so again, with internet issues I am going to cut this off now and try to upload it. Fingers crossed and I will continue to send out pieces of the rest of the story a little bit at a time.