Well today was not necessarily the best day. The MWR and AERI still appear to be running fine and aside from some short glitches power at the site was stable. The network also works great and we even managed to remotely participate in a trial weather briefing from our site using Google hangout. So this is all the good news.
The bad news: it seems that our lidar indeed suffered some damage on the rough ride across the ocean and the troubleshooting by the vendor only resulted in the diagnosis: it needs to be shipped to England. That’s the last thing I wanted to hear because that means dealing with customs and shipping companies, and likely a good period of the campaign being missed. The laser is working fine but its appears there is an alignment issue which can only be fixed by the vendor’s techs in England. I am also exploring plan B options but this is our current status.
Field experiments never go as planned and some solution will be found but it surely would have been much nicer to report that we are completely up and running!
– Petra