With the LC Crews Station being offline since December 29th 2014 and subsequently losing all power and ability to communicate it was decided that we would need to pull the buoy out and do a thorough investigation into the cause. Consequently the buoy was pulled on February 27th 2015.
               The problem was found at the first point of inspection and was due to a failure in the solar panel junction box whereby condensation had entered and corroded the connection terminals and diodes. This caused the catastrophic power loss.

                                          

A new terminal bar was installed along with new diodes which quickly had the buoy systems back up and running. Further comms tests and instrument tests were performed and it was found that our RF comms were inoperable. This issue has been identified solely to the receiving RF unit at the Little Cayman Research Center. Given that this is not a critical issue it was decided to leave the RF comms offline until a repair can be made at Campbell Scientific. The RF should be back up and running in the near future.

                 Upon confirming that the cellular telemetry was working and that NOAA was receiving our data once again it was decided to redeploy the buoy. This was achieved on March 12th 2015.

We are now using a converted boat trailer to make our deployments and retrievals somewhat easier.