Sumba day 1

We've just finished 2 stations on Sumba, leaving 1 for tomorrow. Stations looked pretty good, but all of these q330 stations seem to be giving me a curveball to test me. The first station had a little problem with the GPS - seems like it has a somewhat weak antenna and we had it pointed down. We flipped the antenna up and out and then forced the GPS to relock and bingo, we got it working happily. The GPS is really just used for a clock; the digitizer (q330) has an internal clock which drifts slightly. So, every few minutes to hours, it wakes up a GPS antenna to get accurate timing information from the satellites. The second station had one of its "booms" out of position. The instruments are basically a set of capacitive plates and what we really do is measure the voltage needed to keep those plates at a constant distance. The boom for one of these plates was not quite aligned within our tolerance zone, so we sent a recenter. But no response was seen on our handheld communication device (clié). So we did a manual recenter with the connecting box and it centered nicely.

Little video recorded between the stations. It is really striking how different Flores and Timor are compared with northeastern Sumba!