8 days a week

I get overwhelmed when I think about describing this place, this work, and this new life. So instead of trying to get all the points across all at once, I think a portrayal of what we do will come out, piecemeal, over many coming blog posts.

So far, we work an 8 day week, which just isn’t enough for all the researching, learning, tinkering, and troubleshooting we still need to do. We spent last weekend ‘training’, and on Monday jumped right into projects with Ian. Tuesday and Wednesday we spent working without Ian, and on Thursday, Ian and his family left- leaving John and me on our own for 4 days (yikes!)

We spent several days this week working on what we call the Mountaintop. This is a site at the top of a nearby mountain that will are using as a relay site. Data from hydrophones, underwater cameras, and HD remote cameras gets sent via radio to a tower at the top of the mountain, and from there is beamed wherever we want it to go (the school, a coffee shop, the town center…). At the top of this tower is a wind generator and next to it are a set of solar panels to power this relay station. Everything that we set up up there has to withstand wind speeds up to 130 MPH (have I mentioned the nasty winters here?) so we spent a few days this week engineering (read: jury rigging) the tower to make it “totally bomber”, in Ian’s words.

While we were up there, we set up a few radios and aimed them at Ian’s house, in hopes of testing some equipment and their transmitting abilities from here. Unfortunately, we had no visibility from the mountain when we installed them (it was pouring down rain) so we basically guessed which way to point them. I’m not sure we got it quite right, as we can’t pick up a signal from down here. But we’re not totally sure because we haven’t seen the mountain from Ian’s house either (it’s still pouring down rain).

I spent all day today troubleshooting two encoders that we have to use for the hydrophones and underwater cameras. 10 days ago, I didn’t know what an encoder was and now I know what the inside of one looks like, how to reconfigure it, how to change it’s IP address, and who to talk to in their customer service department.

The fascinating thing about this work is that nobody else is doing this. We are not dealing with one company that makes remote wildlife video cameras and hydrophones and relays and recording software and all the connections in between. The cameras are meant to survey casinos, the radios are meant to pick up internet signals, the encoders ---well, who knows what encoders are supposed to do. It seems like there is an extra adaptor between every connection because the two pieces of equipment are not made to interact.

This keeps it challenging, and sometimes frustrating, but also exciting because we will be getting data nobody else knows how to get.

And that’s the ramble I will leave you with today.