station visit: power-cycling the cellular modem

This blog entry concerns the first visit by our Saipan colleagues to the CREWS station after its loss of communications. It is reconstructed from email descriptions. I am not certain when this visit took place except that it must have been some time on Tuesday October 4th or Wednesday October 5th.

From an excerpt from an email from David Benavente (Coastal Resources Management, Saipan), dated Thursday, October 6th, 2011 (7:38am Saipan time):

So there is still power at the station and we did what you suggested. I climbed up the stick, first I checked the power supply and saw that the light was still blinking. I unplugged then replaced the power [cord]. But I wasn't properly able to check everything else, the swells were rocking pretty hard. We still weren't able to get a connection though. The plan is to try and head out there today and if the weather cooperates I'll try cycling the modem again.

Some more details were requested by Jim Hendee (AOML, Miami) in a message dated Thursday, October 6th, 2011 (11:30am Miami time):

I take the station is still in an upright position and not leaning? Glad it has been making it through the swells. Does anybody have an idea on just how bad the swells and winds were there in the Bay?

That led to this update from David on Friday, October 7th, 2011 (11:33am Saipan time):

6-9 ft maybe a little higher, The stick seems to be holding up well. Our field day got scrapped the other day. We do plan to head out there again next week.

(signed)
Mike J+

Saipan CREWS station offline

[This is an edited version of an announcement I sent out on Monday, October 3rd.]

As of this writing the Saipan CREWS station is offline.

The last successful data download from the station took place at 19:10 UTC on October 2nd. To put this into perspective, this was 9am Sunday in Honolulu, 3pm Sunday in Miami, 7pm Sunday Universal, and 5 am Monday in Saipan. As I write this message it was just over 25 hours ago.

When I realized, the first thing I tried was to connect to the modem. I tried connecting with the Airlink software and by telnet, from AOML servers and from machines outside our firewall. I cannot reach the modem.

[This was followed by a request to the Saipan folks to verify that the station was still physically intact (it was) and for our PacIOOS collaborator in Honolulu to verify that he was similarly unable to connect to the modem (he was) and to begin the process of troubleshooting the cellular modem failure (a process to be described in forthcoming blog posts).]