NOPP P.I. Meeting Minutes
May 8, 2000

FleetLink PI Meeting on May 8, 2000 at MIT Sea Grant

Present: A. Bucklin, K. Ekstrom, C. Goudey, R. Groman, P. Wiebe, G. Williams.

Absent: R. Barnaby, D. Holsom, D. Mountain, C. Pendelton

We began the meeting, at 10:15am, with updates from the FleetLink Partners.

Cliff and Ken

Cliff and Ken went to Rockland to replace the hard drive and install a new power supply in the Susan&Caitlyn installation. At the dock, it only works on the battery. The boat power is poor. It needs a new 12 volt alternator. If Craig gets more 32 volt batteries, then they could use a 32 volt inverter, which would be a better solution. The existing 32 volt inverter does not generate clean enough power to run the system. They recommend getting new 12 volt deep cycling batteries and a 12 volt alternator. We also discussed investing in a better UPS and adding another port so that a controlled system shutdown could be done whenever the power fails. Cliff and Ken agreed to do this on both boat installations.

It was suggested to use the boat at Expo in October in Boston for outreach.

It appears that the Athena clock cannot be reset from the SatNav nor can the system clock be reset while Athena is running. There was a question whether the computer's clock is accurate enough. They will check the specifications on the system clock.

Another check to perform would be to do an auto restart of Athena when the data file name has a tilda in it since this is an indication that there is a problem. Perhaps a batch file could be used to kill Athena and restart it when necessary. Ken and Cliff will look into this.

The second Trimble Inmarsat-C unit is expected in a couple of weeks. They will put the sensor on the roof at MIT to check things out. Since there is a question whether our first GPS is working right (or is it just designed that way), Ken will use the new GPS system in the Trimble unit to see if it gets similar readings.

Bob

Bob asked that ship and date information be transmitted along with the catch data in order to properly process the catch data.

Bob displayed the on-line data via viewgraphs. Peter noticed several bad SST values. Bob will edit these and add code to try and illiminate them automatically.

There was a debate whether date and time needed to be removed from the "publicly" displayed data. Some felt that removing only the position information was not enough. We need to get additional information from the fisherman to see if additional data need to be removed from the public display.

Bob received the fish catch hail form from Wendy at the Portland Fish Exchange and shared it with Ken to help in designing the e-mail hail report of fish catch.

We discussed the need for User Documentation, now that we are contemplating installing the system on a second boat (Bobby Kohl's boat).

Gary

Gary reported that the communications system is working. It is sampling temperature and pressure and the messages are being relayed to the deck unit. They tested the unit to 1000 feet in the laboratory and tested and calibrated for 100 feet. He still needs to do the software for the different rate sampling. It can store up to 1800 samples now, or about one hour of data at the single rate of one per every two seconds. It could go up to 9,600 samples. Gary plans to use 1 - 2 seconds during the gear lowering and raising, and 1 minute sampling at the bottom. He contacted Craig for a field test, but Craig is in France. Gary said he'd want to go out with the boat during the field test.

2nd Boat

Bobby Kohl's 65 foot, steel hulled Glenna & Jacob is the vessel of choice for the second installation. Bobby uses WinPlot and Ken will install it on our machine in order to replace Bobby's PC. Bob G. was tasked to contact Dave Hosum to order a second SST sensor, "just like the other one" but with quadrupple the cable length. [Follow up: Dave said that a sensor won't be available for many months.]

The boat will be in Woods Hole in early June and the next meeting was originally scheduled to be in Woods Hole at this time, but that had to be changed.

Budget

Originally it was felt that we could not easily extend the end date (July 1) for the project, but after today's meeting Ann was able to secure a no-cost time extension.

We estimated it would cost $20K in communications costs to do field demonstrations for three vessels from July 1 - January 1. MIT needs additional funding to install the system on the vessels. (Cliff proposed Cameron McLessan's boat as the third vessel.)

Miscellaneous

System calibration is still an issue. Perhaps boats can take advantage of NOAA buoys to verify the calibration of the sensors. There are buoys Southest of Georges Bank, Nantucket, Gulf of Maine, and maybe at Franklin Basin. [Did I miss any?] The Portland buoy was also suggested for Craig's boat. We need David Mountain's input on this.

We discussed several modifications to the hourly, but full, data transmission protocol. These include transmissions once per day (of less data); transmissions of hourly values (for the National Weather Service) but not all the data; and transmissions of five minute data rather than minute data. The idea is we would obtain the complete data sets when the boat reached port. However, it was recognized that this would be difficult to do in practice. The suggestion was also made to try and deal with the binary data files, rather than converting them to ascii before transmission.

Bob will contact the National Weather Service about accepting the hourly Athena data atuomatically.

The next meeting will be Monday, June 19, 2000, in New Hampshire.

Prepared by Bob Groman
Original: June 16, 2000