Day 3 in Phuket, Thailand (8 April 2014)

Ok! the jet-lag is gone today, and woke up at 5:45am, which is the best so far. I managed to have a little swim in the morning before I head of to the university. As usual, the university car picked us up from our hotel.

 Start digging!

 Bingo! sensor aligned!

We were so excited to check what went wrong because Matt sent us email that he lost the connection. Well! guess what went wrong? Our computer for some reason automatically shut down exactly at local midnight. It did not take us long to figure out the reason and Kathryn fixed that shortly, while I was taking care of the out door work. Ya! out door work! if you think the Thai work hard as the Chinese does, I'm afraid that you are way far wrong. Anyway, the out door work did not go as far as we expected before lunch. However, after lunch we investigated the spice that can hibernate the Thai laborers to work fast and hard. Well! it worked nicely and accomplished almost everything. That means, the censor got aligned, the building got drilled and the mag and GPS cables placed in properly, cables buried, the GPS antenna mounted. The only thing left for tomorrow morning is to put fencing around the sensor just let people know that there is something and please do not get closer. Fantastic! 

 

The two GPS antennas side by side!

Ops! The SCINDA GPS receiver, since we sent short GPS cable, it was not enough to go to the proper antenna location. Initially, I was told that the fourth floor is allowed to place SCINDA computer so that we'll get enough GPS cable antenna. However, latter that promise got reversed and we were strictly told that we have to use the same room where our mag electronics are hiding. Then I took a gamble and put the GPS antenna close to the mag GPS antenna, the cable barely made it to the second floor. However, I'm not comfortable, may be I'm wrong and the SCINDA team can correct me, because we placed the antenna in the middle of the 30 degree inclined sheet metal roof and that may cause a lot of multi-path. Solution! we have to send long GPS cable as soon as possible so that the GPS antenna will get very appropriate location that we already identified. Other than the data transfer seems successful, because I got message from Chris that he already started receiving data from here. bingo! 

 Here is Patong beach look like at the night side!

Since we accomplished a lot in one day we celebrated with nice dinner and few draft beer and also got a chance to walk around to see the night side of Phuket. What a successful day, thank you everybody. We will go back to the university for final check-up to see if everything is working ok before we head of back to Bangkok for our second mag deployment at AIT. So, see you tomorrow for the update!