Unfortunately, logistic errors during station installation rendered us unable to configure and test the radios that would now be required for this connection. We had the radios during installation in August but not the antennas required to make them work, and we were given the wrong version of the LoggerNet software (required to communicate with the datalogger via the radios) to install.
I summed up the situation in an email message dated Tuesday, November 29th, 2011, at 2:54pm Miami time:
Well the $64000 question is: what is wrong with the station?
Until yesterday it seemed like the likeliest explanation was that the modem wasn't working properly. But now we know that (1) the modem works okay on land, very close to the station and (2) now there doesn't appear to be any power coming to the modem when it is plugged in to the station. [I think that's new, right? The modem's lights were okay when it was last observed connected to the station?]
Dave describes seeing some red lights when looking at the control package, or "brain." The brain does not have a power indicator, but several of its components have lights. My best guess is that Dave is seeing the status light from the RF radio. This light normally blinks red when it's waiting for a connection but it may shine solid red or green at other times, like during startup, or if it is communicating.
I'm a little reluctant to draw conclusions based on Dave's report without knowing exactly which light he was looking at. I generally don't pay much attention to the brain lights and sometimes in strong sunlight I can't really tell if they're lit. But normally the lights aren't important because I can connect by laptop and RF radio from the boat and verify that everything is working.
Which is what I think we should try next. Give me a day or two and I'll see if I can take some shortcuts with the LoggerNet configuration -- I will install it afresh here and see if I can cut and past some key files, rather than try to lead you step by step through the software setup. I'll also check if we can ship you the power cords you'll need to run the radio, either on land or from the boat (your choice).
If I had to guess, I'd say maybe some wires on the brain have been pulled loose since October 2nd. If so, the best scenario would be if only the modem's power wires have come loose, and the station is otherwise fully operational. Given Dave's report of on-again, off-again lights, though, we can't be sure of this. Also it doesn't explain what happened on October 2nd in the first place.
But once we have a better idea of what's going on now, we can decide what to do next. This will probably involve disconnecting everything up top and removing the brain package completely. Then there may be some limited troubleshooting we can try remotely, or we may have to ship it back to AOML for examination.
Following this exchange I shipped radio/logger power cables to David on December 1st (a shipment that was delivered on December 6th). On December 8th I wrote up a four-page document (available here: <ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/ocd/pub/jankulak/saipan/Saipan-LoggerNet.pdf>) with detailed instructions on how to install the software and connect to the station using the radios.
However, this attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, as reported by David on Thursday, December 15th at 11:11am Saipan time:
I tried to connect to the station using the RF radios today but was unsuccessful. Log error message box said that it was an "unreachable destination". That was the same result when I tested it out at the office.
This signaled the end of our efforts to connect by radio. The next step would be to physically remove the entire control package (the "brain") in order to access its stored data.