Message posted by Ron Milione Ph.D. on November 04, 2011 at 5:12:31 PST:
The station actually has 2 means of communications. One primary and the other secondary (of course). The primary means is a 2-way CDMA modem that communicates with one of our data servers, usually every 10 minutes. The data server then processes the data and posts it a database where a web server can access the data for display and queries on the web. The secondary communication is via the NOAA GOES satellite. This communication is a one-way communication that occurs once per hour. They only allotted a 15 sec window (at 300 baud) to send the previous hours data. This data stream is then received by a ground station in Wallops Island, Virginia. One of their servers accesses the ground station each hour to retrieve the transmission, decode the data stream, process it and post the data to the database. Regards, Ron
They are using both means of communication for various reasons. The CDMA provides them a 2-way communications, so we can trouble shoot problems from remote and pass more data than allowed via the GOES link. They will also be trying to use this link to access the camera at the site. However, they have been finding that this link is being very tempermental. Currently, the data from the GOES link is being posted to the web. Actually they were very surprized to find any link for the CDMA and there original plans were to use only the GOES and not install any camera. They have been using the GOES link for several years at other remote sites and it has served them well even with its limitations. (The lower elevation station in adjoining Badger Spring Valley is using only the GOES for communications where there is no CDMA signal)
In case you're wondering, they have investigated other means of communications, but not found any that have extremely low power requirements (<150mA when active and <10mA when not active), they were consistently reliable, could be deployed at low expense in very remote locations, were readily available off the shelf, and cost of operation and maintenance is cheap or free (CDMA doesn't quite fit this, but the teams couldn't pass up the chance to test installing a camera).
As for the camera, they are involved in 2 other projects where cameras have been installed this year. One is an NSF EPSCOR project where they have cameras installed on 2 transects in eastern Nevada (on the Snake range near Great Basin N.P.) and the other in southern Nevada (on the Sheep range in National Desert Wildlife Refuge). The other is a NOAA project where they upgraded several rural CEMP (Community Environmental Monitoring Program) stations to include severe weather advisory signs and cameras to monitor the advisory signs and the local weather. Both these projects are also still in development and they don't believe the cameras are available yet. They told me that they have been finding interesting issues in deploying cameras at these remote locations. The NSF project will have its own web page http://sensor.nevada.edu, but they have been posting the data at http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/GBtransect and http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/SRtransect . The CEMP project can be accessed at http://www.cemp.dri.edu. (I just checked the NSF project page and now see that images from 5 of the project cameras are now available.)
In Reply to: Camera on Tikaboo- Just Ask posted by gp3po on November 03, 2011 at 4:32:09 PST:
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