Installing the radar

Well I think I owe you some updates between the last two posts. About two weeks ago the radar finally arrived on a Monday. Seems to have been the 18th. So it was only about six weeks for the customs and a month after Lea's arrival. After trying a bit around with the equipment on Monday we went to Fuego on Tuesday, where Lea, Hester, Erin and I hauled the Tripod (pretty massive steel construction, built for the time till the volcano decides to get rid of it) up to the site of the installation. This took us about two and a half hours and was pretty much all we did on that day. We moved the site on wshich we wanted to install the system again by some twenty meters because the previously planned site was too easily visible.

Stick insect pretending to be a stick


Going home

On Wednesday Lea stayed at home and I went up with John, Andrew, Erin and Hester. The first run brought a car battery, a garafon (~20l) of water and some smaller things like a steel rod and cement up to the installation site. While the others installed the tripod, Andrew and I carried the 1.2m satellite dish up. I still can't really believe we got that thing up there but it worked really well.

The driver knows the way

Thursday was a day in the office. Basically trying around with the equipment and going shopping for more stuff to carry up.
Friday Andrew and I went up again. This time with Martin and Adi. We brought another two garafons of water, two batteries and a big plastic box up. You can't imagine how versatile a 114l plastic box can be. By the way, garafons are easiest to carry if you just put them in your backpack and walk up the hill. Putting them on a stick and sharing them between two is more work. Batteries on the other hand can be very dangerous to backpacks. I experienced this on a field trip in the Tuscany where I more or less killed my backpack with a car battery that was leaking sulfuric acid. It took a very good shoemaker to get it back to life. So for batteries it seems to be best to share them between to people on a stick. In the evening Andrew and I stayed in a tent while Martin and Adi went back.

Cooking dinner


My tent in the morning

Saturday was the day of the big group. John brought Gemma, Adi, Lea, Hester and Erin up so we were eight people to carry stuff up. Another 20l of water, two car batteries, two pieces of metal roof, all the electronics (including five solar panels from Hamburg, Nick's panels are still missing) and some more cement made their way up to the site. We spent the day installing everything and in the evening all systems were running. Everybody stayed in their tents for the night.

Eruption on the way to the radar


Fuego in the evening

Sunday the work on the bunker continued while Lea and I tried to set up the radar so it would give us good data. Then we tried to aim it above the crater of the volcano by checking where its beam hit the volcano and guessing from that where we were pointing. We ended up not too far from where we thought but probably still too far to get good data. When we arrived back in Colima we all went completely covered in dirt to Tacos Orientales, our favorite tacos dealer which sells enormous portions. :)

Breakfast


View down on the way to the car


Fuego and the landscape around it


A part of the group decided to walk along the baranca


Adi took a photo of us


The truck was at its packing limit with 8 people and camping equipment

On Monday I went up with Lea and John again. We did the real calibration of our aiming by pointing our radar at a little set of rotating radar reflectors that we set up in 300m of distance and then pointing an aiming scope directly at this reflector. The quality of the aiming of the radar can easily be seen in the amount of reflected energy and since we had a pretty good guess from our experiment on Sunday it took us only an hour to get it to point to the right place.

This tree was in the way of the volcano


An impact crater of a lava bomb


Close-up of fuego. From here it is really impressive


The corner reflector for the calibration with the radar in the background

While I went back to get the reflector, John and Lea brought all our equipment into our newly built bunker. Here it has some protection from the sunlight and other weather effects. The sun is pretty strong up on 2500 m and we had some trouble with overheating of the logger in the start. This seems to be settled now. You can find a bunch of images that were taken during Leas time here in her web album.
On Thursday Lea left again and on Friday I went up again with Erin after going through a complete planning chaos with trip options switching days multiple times.
3A report of that trip is in the last post.
I will add some photos to this post later.