Description: | Several related and recurring problems with the MWRs have been reported dating back to
1999. These problems were due to the occurrence of blackbody signals (in counts) that were
half of those expected. The symptoms included noisy data, spikes in the data, negative
brightness temperatures, and apparent loss of serial communication between the computer and
the radiometer, which results in a self-termination of the MWR program.
Because these all initially appeared to be hardware-related problems, the instrument
mentor and SGP site operations personnel (1) repeatedly cleaned and replaced the fiber optic
comm. components, (2) swapped radiometers, (3) sent radiometers back to Radiometrics for
evaluation (which did not revealed any instrument problems), and (4) reconfigured the
computer's operating system. Despite several attempts to isolate and correct it, the problem
persisted.
It became apparent that some component of the Windows98 configuration conflicted with the
DOS-based MWR program or affected the serial port or the contents of the serial port
buffer. This problem was finally corrected by upgrading the MWR software with a new
Windows-compatible program. |