By far the most frustrating thing to troubleshoot onboard the Oceanus has been the satellite Internet. Unfortunately, it’s what we need to fix on a regular basis and what people care about the most. Simply put, when the Internet is working people are happy and think highly of the marine tech’s capabilities. When it’s not, well you get the idea.
Early Saturday morning after deploying another Ocean Bottom Seismometer I returned to my station and realized that the Internet was down. I rushed to the main lab to have a look at the L-band satellite modem but all indicator lights were looking good with reasonable numbers for azimuth, elevation, and Automatic Gain Control (AGC). Puzzled by the fact that things looked ok I went up again to inspect our network router, but that didn’t seem to have any problems either.
At this point my limited knowledge prevented me from doing much more. I really didn’t want to begin pushing unknown buttons potentially causing greater damage. Instead I started going through the 500 page modem manual trying to find what could make the Internet go down but have all green indicator lights, waiting for Johna, the marine tech, to come on watch.
What is frustrating with this complex system is that it could start working by just rebooting, never knowing what was wrong. Other times we go through a long series of diagnostic tests treating probable errors. In the end we are never 100% sure that what made it work is a direct result of a specific sequence of actions we took.
Once Johna arrived we spent two hours trying to narrow down the source of error. It could be our network router, the satellite modem, the antenna control unit (DAC), the gyroscope input, or even a loose cable. She had a feeling that something might be wrong with the power of the antenna, so we asked the captain if we could use the iridium telephone to call technical support. Steve, from customer service, confirmed that we where outside the footprint of our satellite and we had to increase the power. So we logged into the page interface and changed the power level from -26Dbm (Decibel-milliwatts) to -24Dbm and just like that the Internet started working.
Lesson learned: when we are more than 200 nm off the coast and the internet goes down for no apparent reason increase the power level and see if that helps.