As far south as you can go: Progress report

Lee and I had quite an eventful week. This prevented from posting, but I have a lot to talk about now.

I wrote about our progress in the "work blog", I will copy some of it here:

On Saturday, February 2, Lee and I had an ambitious day planned - to visit Schwerdtfeger, Marilyn and Alexander Tall Tower! stations in one day.

It was our second day flying with Brent and Darin - the Ken Boreck Air (KBA) pilots. They ended up helping quite a lot with everything, providing extra hands, advice and tools to fix some issues. And they also showed me how to make snow angels. I want to extend my appreciation and my support to all the KBA crew members. Every single person we worked with was wonderful at his/her job and very supportive with ours!

So, back to our Satruday. Lee and I were joined by Cole - a cartographer and a google maps volunteer, who carried a 360 degree camera. Scwerdtfeger, Marilyn and Alexander Tall Tower! are coming soon to google street view - how exciting is that ;)

The first site we visited was Schwerdtfeger. None of the pilots or fixed wing ops can spell it properly, so the underground name of the station became Schwarzenegger (also misspelled). This station needed the most work - we were replacing all instruments with new set up and possible raising the tower. We actually tried to find this station on our previous with Brent and Darin, but coordinates were old and we did not manage to find the station. The stations we are servicing right now are located on the ice shelf - which is a moving entity. Therefore every year our coordinates shift by

When we were almost done with the install, we had to trouble shoot an issue we encountered with the power system. Our pilots were really helpful - you can see everyone was working here. A parka on the tower is preventing a solar power from being charged.

(Troubleshooting our power system in the field)

Marilyn is an old station, which had issues with the wind measurements. It is due for a full replacement next year, so we replaced the instruments to keep it going for another year. Marilyn tower is leaning - that's another reason why we would have to build this site again - it doesn't make sense to build on top of a leaning tower.

(I'm trying to correct Marilyn ;)

After replacing the boom we waited forever for the station to transmit. We had to wait for 10 minutes at least, but we did not get a signal for while... That's when our dear pilots taught me to do snow angels!