Testing, Testing!

Today I am testing equipment!

I have 14 HOBO U23s on the living room floor waiting for deployment, 14 solar shades to build and 1 GPS to master before the official kick off of the summer field campaign. Before anything gets real though, there is testing.

Last week I started to build a solar shade only to realize that I had forgotten to order the special clamp required to mount the sensor inside. Rookie mistake. It would be an even more serious downer to spend a whole lot of time setting up sensors in the field only to have them not work properly and lose a chuck of potentially valuable data. So, I’ve got one HOBO mounted to the side of the house over night so I can practice deployment, downloading and reading the data. In the mean time, I will be building out a sun shade, taking the GPS for a walk, and finalizing the build out for mounting the sensors out in the field and to the car.

The fact that I am testing equipment at all means I also got permission to mount the sensors in the field! For that, I owe a special thanks to my contacts in the Durham Transportation Office for their time and effort reviewing and approving the plan. Further proof research never happens in a bubble.