Troubleshooting Equipment -- Aka digging ourselves deeper and deeper

2nd Full Day!

MTF: Video chatting Lynn & Iced Coffee from Steph
LFP: F***ING Windows Mobile & Proprietary incredibly expensive software

So for our 2nd day, we basically spent ohh so many hours troubleshooting the different gps equipment. So we have the very fancy new RTK GPS system, which we spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to get working all right. We figure out the problems today and then realize that the army has a very specific frequency band over which the radio of the RTK may transmit here on the Marshalls and unfortunately our RTK is transmitting in the wrong band. So there goes RTK (at least for today). Luckily I bought a subscription for the dGPS (differential GPS) through Omnistar for my work in French Polynesia. It works here (or should!). However, it proved rather challenging to get the Trimble DGPS working with omnistar. It ended with me on skype calling Australia to troubleshoot! Thank god for 24h customer service. 

The problem with the Trimble dGPS is that the accuracy is not as good as the RTK in the vertical (5 cm vs. 20 cm), however it is much better than >3m accuracy (which is what the handheld garmins give us). Once we got that working we went around on the golf cart getting GPR and GPS points all over Kwaj. It was a pretty nice way to get things done! There are a number of pictures below all of Kwaj. motu showing the waves and what not. 

This afternoon Richard and I realized that two of our instruments use the same handheld device for viewing the data. While this is great (no need to buy a new stupid handheld device), we suddenly realized that we would not be able to collect both bathy data (on the hydrolite) and topo data (Trimble dGPS) at the same time! So to fix this, Richard and I decided we could try connecting a different handheld windows mobile device (the DEVIL OS system) to the trimble GPS. Well after 2 hours, when Chris and Steph come back, all we had to show them was that we had gone backwards -- aka we were no longer at square 1 but more like sq. -5 (damn registry changes). Luckily shortly after they left to finish up some errands, we fixed our original hole and progressed back to square 1 (woohoo). Finally after say 4 hours we got to square 3 (it ended up with us carting like 60 lbs of equipment to the middle of a field outside in the dark to get a good satellite connection). So we managed to get mostly all the things fixed for tomorrow. All in all it wasn't the best day (too much annoying downtime) but we ended on a high note compared to no data collection. Tomorrow we go to Carlos and try out dragging the GPR by person-mule plus some hydrolite or chirp!

Richard trying to get the trimble to "converge"

Ocean-view waves :)

Look at wind (aka palm trees all bending one way).

First selfie! (was bored waiting for Richard)

Its been a long day

Panorama looking lagoonward

oceanward beach

Look at the swell! and lack of sand

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