Site Survey Schedule: --------------------- 18Sep05, Sun = CG/JM drove to Tuscon all day. 19Sep05, Mon = installed antennas on 'Comm-Tower', and Mt.Bigelow; met Joe Zender and John Petti and talked briefly with Jim at Observatory. TH flew to Tuscon. 20Sep05, Tue = Met Nancy; drove around east side checking sites. 21Sep05, Wed = Met Rob and discussed GPS Water vapor idea. Drove around west side checking sites including Biosphere. Joe and Nancy departed for Phoenix 22Sep05, Th = Removed eqpt on Mt.Bigelow, Comm-Tower and talked with Jim again before departing Tuscon in pm. TH flew home. 23Sep05, Fri = finished drive to Boulder. Logistics: ---------- Driving time to Tuscon: ~12 hours Avg Speed: 75mph, 5-stops for gas I25 to hiway-26 cutoff at Hatch to Deming on I10. Access to East side of Mt.Lemon Access to the 4 sites is via a dirt/gravel road, named Redington Road, that is windy, dusty and has many 'wash-out' crossings that warn 'do not cross in high-water.' The PAMN, and Nice-Flat sites could be visited by traveling on the west side of the mountain through Oracle and taking Mt.Lemon road south, should only those stations need to be seen. Joe recommended against traveling over the Mt. Lemon road at all but we didn't confirm that. NOTE: the summer season with convective activity can cause these arroyos to fill and prevent travel between sites for a couple of hours. Access to West side of Mt.Lemon: Very good via paved Oracle road / hiway. See Tom's notes Setup/Teardown: A large rental truck cannot be used for setup and teardown for most sites. It is far preferable to use pickups and load 2 stations and/or gear into each. Joe and/or Nancy said they will accompany us during setup... Security: NOTE: A rancher we met near PAMSSE said that anything in sight of the main road will be shot up. There were many shell casings at the gate area. He has had solar panels shot up and others have had extensive damage to hydrological sites including being pulled down. No apparent theft though. JohnPetti and Joe do not believe it'll be a problem because in the summer either a) the access out the road is bad (ie rain runoff) or else it is too hot for the yahoos to go out there. Mt Lemon: --------- Ski Area / SummerHaven: This is very near the top of Mt Lemon. There are cabins that can be rented in SummerHaven that would be very convenient and preferable over the dorms at the Observatory. After the site survey, it makes little sense to stay on top of the mountain. SummerHaven is a small resort that is popular in both summer and winter for skiing. The mountain and this area mostly burned 2 years ago and is being rebuilt. For the record: Ski Area Owner: George Davies Ski Area G.M.: Graham Davies (son of George) Ski Area Op.Mgr: Brian Baily 520-576-1321 (very nice, accomodating) Ski Area Restaraunt open in summer 9-6, closed Tu/We. SummerHaven General Store, PostOffice available: see Phil there SummerHaven Cabins: See Mr Zimmerman at the 'SummerHaven Realty' office on right just as you enter the village. The village is being rebuilt after a fire 2 years ago that did an extensive burn all over MtLemon. Observatory: Site Supervisor= Jim Grantham grantham@as.arizona.edu 520-621-7931 or 5136 Re network: The site has good 2.4Ghz LOS wireless internet to the UofA campus on a tower adjacent to the observatory (see note below). A secondary link exists between Mt.Bigelow and campus which uses a bridge to the Mt.Lemon installation. That link exists to serve the lone observatory over on Mt.Bigelow and as a backup to the direct link from the main installation to UofA. There is also another Wifi link serving KittPeak ~10-15mi. to the WSW of MtLemon. These may have been the conflict we ended up seeing during the site survey although that is not clear. Jim said that their net bandwidth is often heavily utilized with their own requirements, however most operations are at night and transfers are generally done via file/FTP which can tolerate joint use. As a result, Jim did say it may be possible to piggy-back on their network link to campus. I was a bit unclear how high their overall throughput is because he said 'a 56ish kbps continuous' stream from us would be OK and they occassionally get 10mbps, however often operate at more like 500kbps. Re: Base Trailer at observatory There are some tight spots for a tractor coming up on some of the switchbacks and the final road is a bit rough with maybe 7%, however it would be do-able. There is a spot in the rear of their maintenance shed that would work for the trailer that would have a 60A/208/1-phase drop. Jim reports that there is a lot of lightning up here in summer! Regarding the dormatory that is often in a state of flux and needs to be booked ~3-4mos in advance but are often filled up with scientists/students. Recommendations: 1) Observatory would be potentially a good site for the base provided the cabins could be used for lodging, however, given the logistics around the mountain, it would make for a long day and be tedious going up/down the mtn. If base is on observatory, use Motosat for our link to avoid conflicts. Re Comm Towers on Observatory. The 'Comm Tower' at the Observatory is owned by the Arizona Dept. of Public Safety....ie state police, etc. Jim said their link on the tower was by special arrangement and that in his opinion it would be a challenge to get them to approve one of ours. This is the tower we ended up seeing from 3 of the sites on the west side of the mountain. Meanwhile the 90' tower is owned by the Army and the 50' tower to the west side of the compound is owned by the USAF....ie very unlikely access. I asked him about installing one of our own towers on the west side of their area and he was luke-warm about it because the Observatory runs their optics down to 10-30deg off the horizon and they might object to obstructions. Actual observations are primarily at night. It might not be out of the question, though it is uncertain how many of the west-side sites we would see. This option appears to probably be more effort than it is worth unless having 'high-rate-real-time' on some or all of the west side is actually important. Comm-Tower Site: 32:26.499 110:46.804 There are many towers of all varieties; microwave,hf,etc. CG installed Maxstream on NNE leg of tower at the top. Note: Brian, the OpsMgr from the ski area mentioned that addition of new comms eqpt recently had greatly impacted their motorola mobile radio comm. gear to the point of non use.... We did have quite a lot of trouble getting our maxstream test to run at this site. Later from Bigelow we did have it running with good line-of-sight however, it was very intermittent with lots of drop-outs. This indicated a very tenuous situation that could imply problems for our use. One thing we heard is that there are indeed Dept.ofDefense comms up there and of course they won't tell what their frequencies, etc. are. That could be a factor or else the nearby microwaves and/or tv towers. Spectrum Analyzer check didn't show up anything from the ground level, because no doubt we are below the radiating footprints and because the microwave stuff is above the 4.5Ghz range of this analyzer. So I do not know about the 5. 802.11g band. Visibility from top of Comm Tower: Chris could see east and south of downtown Tuscon but not north or west (ie for a link to the base station down below). Overall visibility of the area surrounding the mountain was good except to the east. Bigelow Tower: Angle to Comm Tower on MtLemon 289deg 32:25.001 110:43.529 CG setup the TPOP and the antennas at 30m, with the best look angle he could; that being mostly N/NE/E. The view from up there is greatly impeded by ridges all around although the view to the valley to the SW and to the E-NE does look good. A quick test of the etherlink from the truck worked well, as did another test 1/2 down the mountain. Test at the bottom of MtLemon inside Tuscon however did not link up which is probably related to the antennas being on the opposite side of the tower. In trying to setup the maxstreams we once again had trouble but eventually setup the 2nd unit on the NE side of the tower at the top. This worked although in attempting to use the RSSI feature of the loopback test it did not work and caused loss of the link....It appears the RSSI test 'bleeds signal' or something similar during the loopback test. This continued to be problematic during the site survey at the prospective stations. Also note this test worked well in Boulder. I did discover that having the power set too high on both radios from the base to top of tower caused oversaturation and loss of the loopback. One factor to consider: I setup the maxstreams 'out-of-the-box' as is so it is very possible that with excellent LOS to Tuscon that we are 'repeating' some other radios out there; ie aggravating some folks around Tuscon for a day or two. We may need to determine a more unique setup of the radios..... Also note that during teardown, another MaxRF test was done to the top of the Comm-Tower from on top of truck (a good ground plane). With both the whip and yaggi antennas the results were very good; RSSI -55-75dbm and -45-55dbm. I almost think that the interferring source had gone away; .... was it because we were operating and someone else adjusted their own eqpt or was it temporary conducive rf ??? Initial Conclusion: direct LOS may not be as reliable as desired, and our simple short range test could be inadequate to determine the overall performance....more later. Overall Communications: --------------- Summary Comments: There is no single solution that will work for all sites except either GOES or Iridium with 5-minute summary data. EtherAnt wifi is possible to Mt.Bigelow from some of the east side stations but not all. The same is true for direct LOS. From above it sounds as if Wifi/LOS from the West side stations may be difficult to guarantee. Cell-Phone is probably a good possibility for West-side stations... After the site survey I asked John Petti about Cell Coverage on West Side: He says Verizon is good, Sprint is bad but overall it should be reasonable for Verizon....with exception of the Biosphere. We could confirm cell-phone coverage at the State Park... Re Base: The Univ has many sites around town and one of them may be possible for the trailer such as the MedCtr which is ~6mi south of the Ag site. He confirmed he has never done a downlink from MtBigelow from the Ag site and simply thought you could see the mountain tops and didn't know that you cannot. Re Data Download from Bigelow: John Petti uses an ISDN with roughly 3-4 times the speed of a modem rate. His bandwidth is not used up and consists of file transfers. He would be OK with us piggy-backing provided we do not cause his transfers any difficulty. He will do a bandwidth check for us. As for power there would probably be a couple of solar panels he could provide for summer but we would need to provide our own battery bank and possibly be prepared to provide another panel or two. Sites: See Tom's Notes for more complete information.... --------- MtLemon-MET1: near Prison site This site is basically in a bowl that will not allow LOS to either peak. Joe wants to put a GAOS there because prevailing winds will allow the sondes to fly over the top of the mtn after release. As part of that a met station is desired by Joe. We could consider using the GAOS met pack with some modifications, however, John Petti wants Flux monitoring, implying ISFF.... I think that will prove to be a challenging analysis problem! The site would require either Iridium or GOES for telemetry. The only other idea would be to piggy-back on GAOS' motosat if they deploy one here. Suggestion: investigate the quality of the Vaisala mini-met to use it here....see Ned. PAMSSE; Rodgers Pass: Mt.Bigelow in sight except there is small rise preventing ground-level view from the actual location selected. The top of a mast should see Bigelow OK. 320= data scope to Bigelow. Setting of 9.5degE Access is good: off road but proabably can drive to it. Tpost placed. Private ownership: Billot(sp) ranch... MaxRF ok. EthAnt OK but very weak ~7db snr. The ping test obtained 900kbps throughput with good recovery from on top of a rise rougly equiv to the height of the mast. Note that these two tests could be slightly deceptive because the small hill may induce a fresnel zone obstruction. We were suprized that the Etherant worked so well at this range. PAMN: Mt.Bigelow in sight: 180= data scope to Bigelow. Setting of 9.5degE Access is off road maybe 100yds....it'll be a walk in on Forest Service land. MaxRF Ok, fairly good EthAnt: Ok/acceptable snr 15,21 ss -62,-64 nl -79,-86 Ping 825-1.2mbps with 372kbytes in 5sec. NiceFlat: Both peaks are in plain sight Access is good: off road but probably can drive to it. To get there: Oracle road north to Oracle. Take right and go until a right at the sign: "Oracle State Park" Continue until the Y for Mt Lemon road. Down the road proabably 10+miles and the site is on the flat area just after the MtLemon peak / comm tower come in to view. Tpost placed. Forest Svc Land??? MaxRF-Bigelow: Acceptable although there were drop-outs. MaxRF-Lemon: The link was terrible and very marginal. EthAnt-Bigelow: No lock with TPOP! However driving ~1/2 mile to where we could not see MtLemon, they worked just fine. Because of the poor communications, we tried the Spec.Anal using 900mhz antenna revealed definitely strong signal right at 930 and quite a bit of activitiy at 2.4, and cell 868ish. - Conclusion With the RF of Mt Lemon in view the EtherAnts may not work because most likely their wide field of view. - Idea: consider getting a wireless card for the pcmcia on the NDAQ and run it through to a focused 2.4yaggi instead of the etherants. The other possibility would be to try to run the Etherants off a side lobe by aiming east of Bigelow, although I did try to shield the antenna from the Comm-Tower using the truck. Per Wireless it is an interference problem and we'll have some challenge in going between the 2 mountains. The poorest signals reported on the Terabeam wireless link tests were actually on the TPOP where there is the greatest interference, but were better on the remote antennas...a switch! Catalina State Park Site is on the hill above the water tank. Take main road; left at equestrian/camping; go past latrine and up the "50year road". Top of Mt Lemon visible 93-deg, but not the CommTower. We can see structures off the observatory on the west side of the slope but not their tower. There is what may be a cell tower high on the mountain in plain view. MaxRF: none No look angle to Tuscon PAMW: Up Oracle road; right on Golden Ranch Rod; through new development and onto gravel road; rt at Y Tpost placed off N.side of road. Mt Lemon 115deg to Observatory. Their highest dome is visible but definitely not the Comm Tower. May be able to see Observatory Tower and maybe cell phone. PAMNW: Charouleau Gap 4x4 Road. Tpost placed SE from parking area. Mt Lemon 137deg to observatory and their tower is in sight, at least the top of it. New developments all around area. Solid cell coverage, and in fact we passed a cell tower off Edwin Rd. Biosphere: Lowest priority site; #10. Good view to MtLemon Comm Tower but a ridge blocks MtBigelow. Talked with Joe Martinez their IT person who was very knowledgable. He said they have T3/Fiber but no Wifi on campus and very poor cell coverage here if at all. The locations for placing a met tower here are lousy. MaxRF to Comm Tower: very spotty. GPS Water Vapor: ---------------- Rob Kursinski 520-260-8404 UofA Atmos.Prof. Teaches tu/th. We met Rob on Wednesday and discussed his 'requirements.' He told us his desire is to place one at each site and would like to have real-time data, although when pressed he could live with 'sneaker-net.' The receivers he and his colleague are trying to get are not yet identified and will probably be from Unavco. He still needs to let us know the exact specifications, however... Power Use=18W (trimble4000), 9W(newer), 4W(newest) Expected Data = 1sec * ~60char *86400sec/day = 5.2mByte max/day although less may be possible depending upon what he wants. If we have solid LOS radios and/or Wifi this could probably be done. We also told Rob that he is low on our priority and that we will want to have some eqpt for testing and configuring before deployment. We also mentioned that we may not be able to cover a 18W unit especially if we are running our own Wifi (7-8W), and Flux. The 9W gps would be probably work-able depending upon how much else is put on the station. We told him the 3-4W units would be best. Rop has been in contact with SteveS about these issues. Our guess is that he will get perhaps 4-5 units to distribute on sites around the mountain. Recommendation: Contact Tammy and use hers for testing and/or the project as well?....How many does she have? Full Sky Camera: ---------------- Joe was originally interested in having one or two of his cameras linked back to the base in real-time via our EtherAnt links, and possibly co-locating with one of our stations. During the survey this idea became less attractive due to the communications problems. His plan is to continue to use the Biosphere site for one camera and send data via their network (I believe) and place a second camera somewhere on campus. The may be a slight change he could or may want to place a camera on the east side co-located with one of our sites. For his use, compressed data would be acceptable although the full images = ~230kbytes / every 10-sec. Power is ....tbd Possible ToDo Later -------------------- If we need to perform another 'Communications Survey' prior to setup: - Reconfigure the RF test set with a mica2 to control the repeating of the radio and possibly control which channel, id, etc so that we have some alternatives. Also consider having a fet to power on/off the radio although it would be better to do it via command. And finally we need a better cabling to the radio than what we had during this site survey test. - Determine what is going on with the Maxstream RSSI test. Why it was apparently loading the channel. - Contact Verizon and determine cost schedule for west-side stations. Compare costs versus Iridium. - Incorporate the Iridium - 5min data delivery. MISC Notes ---------- Time Zone: Arizona isn't on daylight svgs time; ie 1-hour earlier in summer than CO. Lightning: There is a lot of lightning activity in summer when we'll be there. It appears the ground is variable but definitely dry. Under much of the soil there is a limestone layer (colatchi?) at about 10-12" that can be a bit of a challenge to drive stakes through. Don't expect to hit the water table with a ground rod! Mobile/GAOS: Joe is wondering whether NCAR systems can be outfitted with a parachute so that after burst the sonde can track down like a drop-sonde. Apparently NOAA has done this. He recognized that Ned is the person to talk to about the idea.