Day 2 (7 February 2016) in Manila, Philippines

As expected today's sleeping conditions was not right. Since I was so exhausted, last night I went bed quite early and unfortunately woken up at 1:00am and couldn't be able to go back to asleep.

Manila observatory

Anyway, after having breakfast I went to the observatory to meet my point of contact. Since I arrived there a few minutes earlier I did walk around the beautiful campas. The 150 years old observatory, which was established by Jesuit, is a separate institute that is not supported by the government. Ateneo de Manila university, also Jesuit university, is located in the same compound. Scientists at the observatory teach at this university.

This is us (left to right James, me and Pope whom I met at ICTP) at the top of the buildings, surveying for GPS antenna location!

Finally I met Dr James Simpus and two other staffs (Pope and Clint), whom I met at ICTP and Indonesia when they came to attend summer schools where I also participated as lecturers. We did not waste time to start navigate a possible home for AMBER sensor. I picked very quite place, at least from external visible magnetic stuff. I requested if we can start testing if the site is really magnetically quite place.
Unfortunately it is not. For the reason we do not know the sensor detected a very big noise that quickly saturate the measurments. It reads way more than 65000nT (maximum range for our magnetometers). We tried different options, such as moving the sensor to different locations, but still big interface that keeps saturate our measurments. We spent more three hours looking into different options but no change. Finally we gave up that this area is not a good site for our sensor, and packed everything back into its box and called it off for the day.
What is next? That was the question I asked to my self. James gave me hope to put it either at the Jesuit residence or at the high school, both of them are away from the observatory. The bad news is, today is Sunday and tomorrow is also a holiday  (Chinese new year), and those offices are closed. However, James will try to contact people from those two facilities if they can allow us in tomorrow at least to test the site if it magnetically quite place. Pray for me to get a nice home of my sensor quickly so that I accomplish my mission ontime/as planned.
Now I'm back to my hotel straggling not to go bed early so that my sleeping conditions behave normal.
Around 10:00pm I got update from James, it seems there are positive sign from both facilities. We may be able to test the site at the Jesuit residence tomorrow afternoon the earliest. However, due to the holiday, we can't do anything at high school site tomorrow. Keep crossing your fingers for the best of luck.