Ross Timmerman (PacIOOS, University of Hawai`i describes the land-based testing (which I believe to have taken place on the morning of Monday, November 21st, Saipan time) in his email dated November 21st sent at 9:35am Honolulu time:
Yesterday's modem test at the golf course was successful. Thanks for your help Steven and David. I was able to connect remotely and check the settings. Everything appears in order. The signal strength was decent (-57) and the network status was good. The number of system resets is also okay; no major increase.
I'm a little concerned we didn't find the "smoking gun", but there isn't much else to test. Perhaps the Docomo network cut out and left the modem with a hanging or stale connection. In these instances I have always been able to connect with AceManager to reboot. However I'm not sure what role Loggernet might play in allowing AceManager to connect in this situation. Anyways, unless we can't devise another test and you folks agree, I would like to reconnect the modem to the station.
Steven Johnson (Division of Environmental Quality, Saipan) describes problems encountered during modem reinstallation in a message dated Tuesday, November 29th at 11:57am Saipan time:
Dave and a few of the MMT guys went out to reinstall the modem and they ran into a few snags. First, when Dave ran up to the station and reconnected the modem, but no power was making its way to the modem. No light – no nothing. Next, the station itself powered down for a moment. The sequence of the lights were as follows: Solid red light –> blinking red light –> no light –> solid red light.
When pressed for more details, Steven wrote the following later that same day at 3:02pm Saipan time:
Hopefully Dave will chime in so you can hear it straight from the horses mouth, but I’ll do my best to clarify:
- The lights we are talking about (red lights changing colors) is in reference to the station itself, NOT the modem. The modem itself showed no signs of power when Dave reconnected it to the station. I believe he left the modem plugged into the station.
- From what Dave told me, the station lights were the ones that were running through the sequence I described in the first email. What lights these were exactly, I am not sure as it was Dave on the stick, not I.
David Benavente was able to provide further clarification in a message sent 4:27pm, Saipan time:
When I climbed up the station I checked to see if there was station power. There was, I saw a solid red light, I observed the light for a couple of seconds. Then I began to hook the modem up, first I hooked up the serial port and then I plugged in the power source. I flipped it over to see if there was power but I didn't see any of the green "Modem" lights flashing. So I left the modem alone for about six minutes observing whether or not there was any change. The modem lights did not light up at all. So I once again tried to remove the power cable and replugged it, but still nothing. At that point I checked to see if there was station power but the red light was not illuminated. I then once again removed and replaced the modem power cable and waited for another two minutes still no "modem" lights illuminated.
After that I checked to see if there was station power and i saw the red light was illuminated again.
I believe this reinstallation visit probably took place sometime on Monday (the 28th) or possibly Tuesday morning (the 29th). Reinstalling the modem did not lead to any improvement of communications with the station -- it has remained completely offline since its original loss of communications on October 2nd.
At this point we had a shift in focus from modem troubleshooting to station troubleshooting. These next steps would involve (1) connecting to the station by radio transceiver, and (2) retrieving the entire control unit (or "brain") for data download and inspection.