Antarctic Underwater Electronics: Subsea Engineering & Connectors

[00:00:16]all right thanks for coming along uh to our june presentation night um this night had its uh genesis at the wia virtual conference where kim was going into uh quite a bit and in fact had quite a few photos of the aurora in dry dock in singapore and i at that point thought this would be a good expanded talk so um that sent kim into a frenzy i suggested no it wasn't actually it was because that was a bit of a practice so that was quite okay um i'd only have one photo of a penguin i have about three photos inside the ship and one of the trawl deck and that's it so so yeah you've had your ship quota so um over to uh over to kim okay right so yeah ken briggs we all know who i am and i know who i am so it's pretty good my memory hasn't totally failed and yet um so that's what justin says very true that's sort of how this came about and um plus even everybody for june so that's another good reason for doing it tonight so what we'll talk about is some techniques that have been developed some by cyro some internationally and some by amd most this is aid so what is here sort of this collection in front of me is just uh second connectors they're underwater connections i'll just talk about those for a second but the this particular beast up here which doesn't have the strobe inside it because it blew up it's a stainless steel strobe that's been manufactured at the instrument workshop in the div i can't remember who machined this it's steino rated for two and a half thousand meters so it's quite happy to to operate at that depth so the fundamental thing is with electronics you're going to put in the ocean it's a bit like your ship you want to keep the water on the outside or your radio gear you prefer not to mix the electricity and salt water so it's the same story if you flood something with salt water you can and it hasn't been turned on you can potentially wash it out and it will work for a little while and then it always dies nothing ever recovers from salt water because the salt just gets inside everything and things start to corrode and you know it's goodbye so to join everything up you use these underwater connectors and these are second brand ones which we use as a few different brands and they come in different shapes and sizes i can't get this one apart i need to heat it up but it's a reasonable size it's about the same size as that one there so it's about maybe 20 conductors all of the pins are gold-plated and the okay the the base of the pin has got a rubber sleeve around it can you see that that little little rubber sleeve yes okay so the idea is when you join them together that rubber sleeve goes inside that rubber housing and the pins are further in so you use a dow corning product dc4 just to lube up all the edges of the of the not the pins of the actual housing and so when they go together they slide together quite nicely the same way by part there we go so so this one apart and do they mate yes they do mate i think can't see my alignment and so they go together like that so as they go together one lot of rubber goes inside the other rubber and they go together and then you you clamp them up tight with the housing but the really good thing about them is as they go down the water and the pressure comes on that outer sleeve gets pushed over the shroud that's around the inside of the pin so they clamp up really tight and when they come apart they go can pop so like i could put a couple of you on the other either end of that one it wouldn't come apart um expensive yeah just a bit a combination like that's probably close to two grand at the moment um you know these ones are about not 30 150 bucks each they normally come with a 450 ml tail about that length and you join them up we'll talk about joining them up in a little while you always buy a tail longer than you need by a bit so if you do have to re-terminate them you can keep chopping the cable back um if you buy it too short you can only chop it off once then you've blown the connector so sort of you try and um plan ahead a little bit but the fantastic part is they will work down to the deepest we use them it's probably about five thousand metres yeah so stick water stuff yeah this is this is um yeah offshore science oil gas those sorts of industries i'm going to show you some photos later something i saw in the wolf one day um when they screw in they screw in and they've got no ring on the face so everything's about pressure it's all about holding the air in and the water out so if the water can't get in the air doesn't come out the air comes out the water goes in and they're all bulkhead fitting so that's called the bulkhead fitting and this cap here is a female cap over the male pins like over those pins and you'll often have a situation where instrumentation gets changed around between the bodies so you'll have one and we'll see this in photos there's like one central controlling unit and everything fans out off that and so as you change your instrumentation around all your function around you'll want to disable those sets of connectors the way you do it is one of these caps and the appropriate size sleeve goes over the top and screws up and they're held together so they're both held together mechanically so they can't come apart in case it gets snagged or and they're held together for protection of the of the electrical contact so talking about if i keep clearing them out and there's just some different styles if i keep clearing them away that way it'll be pretty good and often when you're calibrating something you may need to get sickles out so you can make teslas with those and this particular one is offer a smaller ctd these are quite clever so what you've got there is all of these connectors that are like a pie and they they go into the they plug into the appropriate circular uh female socket and so you load them up now these are all blanks so these are just sealing up yeah and we'll accept that one because it's got cables on it so you'll change the configuration of what you want to for the function that you're doing and then when you've got your configuration right down comes the the outer cap over the hole up the two halves bolt together is fine so it's all it's um it's high reliability it's designed to be reused which is often the two don't necessarily go together and they seal really really well and they allow you flexibility in what you're doing so they're they're these are a c-con too i can't remember what it's like they are but they're quite the same thing as it's going to be a 450 tail and there's the flanking once uh if you want to have a look at any stuff later be my guest so if you've got enough dollars yeah there's probably i have guessed kim two three grand to replace those ones in here you know they're they are high-end connectors um but we will talk about connectors for amateurs because one of the things i want to try and introduce tonight is how we can benefit out of the techniques that the industry is using so what we have up here can we flick these lights off please the overhead lights so what we have up here is a beam trawl and this i had a business for about 15 years and i'd sold it and mary says i was hanging around at home which i wasn't really and anyway the div advertised the job in marine science i mean no it's interesting because i've done a bit for that 15 years before 20 years before back in the nellodan days and so i thought oh yeah i applied and i know it was a job and what we were doing was actually setting up a system and there was this project called cmark which was the census of antarctic marine blah blah blah everything underwater and everything in the water column and um so i ended up working with the e-lab for a while with um ellen and co ellen's 7k aj is that correct yes okay it's good guess who's in canon at the moment yes and so we're over there so what we've got here is a bean trawl this this trawl runs along the wall in the ocean just like a sleep and it's dragged along by the ship at about half a knot now the gear that you can see didn't bring my pointer is a series of lights there's four lights on it so the narrow flood light is this one here and they're lead lights and they're mounted on an aluminum substrate uh the aluminum substrates a slip fit inside the aluminum housing of the lamp so you don't need a heat sink because the whole lamp isn't heating and you're in water at about minus two degrees yeah so that's not an issue oh beauty i hope you're not seeing us so video camera in the middle video camera and that's the video camera out of the housing the this is an early one there's lasers there uh the narrow flood lamp so the narrow flood lamps look quite tight we can see some of the images these ones are floods that spread out further and in these tubes here are the battery packs and it was all totally self-contained we set a timer up on it it would go over the side to get lower down at the bottom and it would come on at its own time yeah we knew roughly how long it takes to get to the bottom and then what place of how quickly the cable was going up that was hanging on and the depth of the water and so as it went down i would sit at about that attitude as the ship's moving forward because the the net out the back which is like a big trawl net would act as a drogue and underneath it you'll see in a minute there is a green map which was nanny where matt if i go down do uh page down or down down okay let's just let's do taking a while uh sideways okay fair enough so i'll wait for them um this is uh just out off the east coast there's a ship in the background um and the water's too blue for italian so this is the other version which is using that's probe and that stills camera which i'll show you in a minute so everything was interchangeable we could swap over in about 20 minutes half an hour but we had two systems because it's far better to use two different systems rather than swap over because you have to get all your alignments organized again same battery packs and there was some battery capacity in there as well the strobes are the camera which is in there i'll show you that's a canon slr this is circa the strobes were canon off-the-shelf strobes running in in the container running dry csiro developed that system and we adapted off it it was controlled by a tiny tiger both systems had tiny tigers try it which were a uh a nice little you can't call them a pick it's wrong with pie almost well yeah it's a computer in a box basically and you run basically on it so it was quite quite a high level computer and stuff they were about 100 bucks each then and we used quite a few applications uh and now we're firing the strobes through a total state relay um one thing you may have noticed with all of this gear this is another thing i found in the ship and i was featuring another day for another project it is a lot of this equipment's round like a cylindrical so the things that you put in the ocean are cylindrical or spherical like a boy and the reason that's really simple it's it's compression it's pressure so the this is the stills camera that's in an aluminum housing wow this is an aluminum housing and so the actual mechanical design pete de vries built these i think this is part of the siren designed adapted by pete the actual components of it provide bulkheads inside the cylinder so they reinforce the cylinder because assemblies like a beam the ends are the strongest and the beam curves so if you put bulkheads in the cylinder you allow it to take a higher pressure so that's the concept behind that and also the bigger the moment the bigger the level of compression and that's a bit of old um electronics underwater electronics from american eg i don't actually know what it is it does affect it but have a look at it because it's all analog and each board has its own function so this isn't like an 80d board and blah blah blah so this is the stills camera system which is running in strobes the video camera system was running the floodlights the floodlights ran continuously because it was video the strobes were fired by the camera okay uh too far back try that one thank you so keen was the camera programmed in such a way just to keep taking photos yeah we could change the settings before we fire go to the side yeah um hang on let me go back yeah we're going forward here music underwater camera for shots no and we end up there let's go back okay here we are back where we were good okay so strobe strobe the scanner depth sensor is basically a radar for underwater and it just pings down and it tells you how far off the bottom you are so it lets you know what's going on which is good so there's the camera um that is another pinger we're looking now for measuring depth off the bottom the camera body there and there's all quick changes bolster here and it's adjusted then you can put it around scanner over there and there's one of these strobes looking straight down and as you can see the sequin connector on top we had a couple of different configurations depending on what we were doing but that's the basic configuration that's serious engineering oh yeah yeah it's serious it is serious i wouldn't even hesitate what it would cost that creativity deserves a pay rise and put these things together um that's the troll net you can see the scan bar up there and so this is the back and this whole thing looks like heavy close to a ton and it was running on about a 22 mil cable off the back of the ship so yeah you've got this on the bottom and you've got 10 000 tons rough enough of ship on the front chugging it along so there were times where you know we pulled the ship up actually one day and we got stuck against a bit of a cliff underwater and there it is going over the side out through the chute and the oh there is some stroller sweater there's two in a row and that's the strobe now when we we did some really long transects from shallow water out into 2000 meters the limit for this was two and a half hours um just to take a photo every i don't think it was every time i think it was every 30 seconds so it takes it's like about two hour drag so a lot of photographs and we found we were getting black images because the strobes weren't firing the strokes just couldn't keep up with the recharge rate and so we had a look at a few options so we used this system over a couple of years a couple of voyages a few voyages so one of the solutions put up by the elap was to fill them up with oil and that sort of worked for a while but then you all got into all the capacitors and all the other components and it went even more unreliable so the simple solution would have been to just keep changing the strobes you know run a strobe for a thousand shots or something rather than throw it away for the new money but considering that it was commercial equipment off the shelf um put into a in an industrial application and the camera getting dragged along the bottom i think we had two cameras fail and basically just mechanically fell apart those couldn't go you know but i would like to drag along the bottom either a bit scary uh and that's a sequence of shots so we're there's afternoon tea for the guys we didn't have lasers on obviously the lasers were bright enough that you couldn't use them without laser glasses so we had to be a bit careful this is just an image of the trawl deck for focusing purposes and you can see the cable there with a swivel in the middle so so what what what function did the lasers have in this oh i'll get to the second oh sorry that's right okay now this we we also used it in a vertical mode in the horizontal mode so if we were using it on the bottom of the c2d which i'll show you in a second you were looking straight down and so we did like we might have done 120 uh ctd drops and so we thought every time it goes down we can take photos with that'll be quite good we'll get a cross record like a a correlation between seabed and where we were in terms of gratitude and longitude but the problem was that the ships are ship and the ctd hangs out here and the ship rolls and so you lower it down and you really have to be fairly close to the bottom and if the ship rolls the wrong way and you close the bottom you're in the bottom and if it your the image takes is taken as you roll away you're out of focus and so we had we sort of persevered and we needed a means of knowing how big the object was on the bottom that we're looking at because it's like looking at the moon you have no idea and that's that was something said to me today about rocks from the distance uh on the moon you just don't realize how big they are when you look through the telescope and it's exactly like this here so by having two lasers pointing down 450 apart then we had a rough measurement but we didn't have any depth so we probably should have had a third laser going across at 45 degrees maybe intersecting two meters out yeah and from that then we could have scaled but but because of the problems with it uh rising and falling so there's another thing you see the two laser dots yeah yeah so that that they're parallel and they're about 450 apart so yeah that's pretty close to the bottom and also when you got higher you couldn't see them so going back that's what we were getting out of the stills out of the bottom off the ctd it was really variable quality and it wasn't worth pursuing for the amount of effort involved and you only got about um uh two minutes of bottom time when you could use it and part of that was the ship if the sea if there was any sea was on the ship was rolling wasn't usable anyway so it sort of went into the good idea of a bad application type thing so this is coming across to trawling you can see the shadows of the tall wires and that strokes that's the two strokes firing out this is cv so let's take it from about or the height of the camera as we saw in the photos only about that high above the seabed and that that's not bad um the quality varies a bit depending on the conditions and how silty it was but that's yeah that's a usable image there's another one and these look like plants for the raw animals because we're down a couple thousand meters there's no sun there's no photosynthesis so these are all animals even though they look like plants which is in itself a bit strange to sort of quantify and you can see the chains going up to the uh troll cable so the sled was being dragged over the top of that yeah and this that's another point of contention in a minute so there's bottom there oh yeah yeah footprints it's been there i can bore you all night but these are thousands of photos but that's the propeller from the brother so that's that would be taken with a flash but it's just natural light basically then of course the trawl gathers up everything that goes into the mouth of the trawl and so you end up with a big bag of critters and the science grew on board we had a considerable number of science people there they then go through and sort out all the specimens and put them into classifications and then they'd go off around the world after the ship came back to hobart and the stuff had gone through quarantine and they'd then go to the experts around the world that dealt particularly with those types of animals and sorted them through so we basically every time we did a trawl we generated new um life forms for that area because it's never been that was why it's a census that had never been done before but the problem is to get all that stuff up you've run a trawl across the bottom and so you've left kilometres you know three metres wide of i've turned over ground yeah and so the question was would we ever do it again and the answer was no so we did um a couple of events like that but this was the primary one would presume that would recover reasonably quickly maybe not okay bio to what's it called bio remediation i did a voice later with a guy called andrew constable he worked for he was a div person but he was representing for australia and camelot which is the confederation it's a conservation of antarctic marine living resources living resources thank you and i had that discussion with him one night i'll sit around and have a cup of coffee and so we've done all this work setting the ship up as a longliner would you believe and we had a camera system in a long tube on the long line to try and work out how the long run interacted with the bottom and so we'd spent a lot of work on that and cost a fair bit of money in ship time anyway after about three or four days so that's it let's go we're going over there further west and i said so andrew we've done all this work what's your story he said it's like this kimmy sorry to get this ship for 10 days every five years i've got enough information he said we've found rubbish on the bottom which means there's been humans in this area probably fishing we've seen parallel lines that were made by rollers on the bottom of the net that indicates there's been fishing he said we've seen drag lines which could well have been long lines that indicates it's been fishing he said now this area is closed uh i don't know when that was done he said i now take all your images back and give it to the benthic the sea bed experts and they'll come back to me and say they'll look at the like the trench made from a roller or the drag mark from a chain and they'll be able to calculate how quickly their surface has been turned over and so by looking at what's living there and the characteristics of the you know the holes they make in the seabed or whatever then they can determine how long ago that activity took place and if it's a long time ago when the activity was allowed because it was open that's fine but if it's more recent they've got poachers and so he said that's all i need to know and he said so we move on so now we're going to do somewhere else okay ctd it's an abbreviation for conductivity temperature and depth depth pretty straightforward uh there's a cylinder now underneath it's got all the sensors in it these bottles are called niskan bottles and they've been around since the very very early days of oceanography in the top here there's a release mechanism it's all titanium and what you've got we've seen in the low flow it's a bit better you've got a cap on the top and a cap on the bottom they're all lowered and empty and so the water flushes through and you fire down the cable and section cable over there i'll show you in the mirror you fire down the cable and it fires the latch the latch releases top and bottom the caps come down and you capture the water in there and then you can bring water samples back from whatever depth you fire it at so you can go normally you'd float it close to the bottom here maybe 20 meters off get one there and you come up every few hundred meters or whatever takes um they go down to about a meter a second they come up at about the same speed the full weight of that is around a ton wow and it's on this cable which is as you can see only seven or so millimeters it's double load double layer spiral steel it's really tough steel and often it's a single conductor so all of the data um comes up through that conductor and all the control signals goes down through the conductor and um of course the cable has to be longer than the davis water you're operating and our deepest water is about 5 200 metres around off capela wind up in southwest west australia so you have maybe six six and a half thousand meters on the on the drum there are two drums on board um and the idea is that every time you take it off the end of the season you chop the cable off the the top section of the cable is the one that really gets hammered when this when the carousel is coming out of the water and if there's any swell on the loads go on and off about a ton rough enough when it's coming out of the water soon if the ship's rolling or there's any swell it goes from being supported by the water to instantaneous loads not a good time so you you just chop it off so that way it allows you over the years to to knock you know your 50 metres 100 metres off and you're underway now before we get on to this i should show you this camera both of these cameras so that's this is the um actually if you're gonna flick the lights up please justin thanks um it is tiny now everything's designed for quick turnaround that's um actually bad the battery pack for the camera and there's the firing mechanism for the strobe in the side they're jammed in um we're using wide angle canon lenses just on fixed focus and that was why the photos of the troll deck were there so that we could work out what our focal length was tiny tiger sandwiched in behind in in behind there and there's another board in behind which has got the firing mechanism well it's on the other side there yeah cyclone batteries some of you may have seen them in emergency exit alarms there's a tube of them those typically you can hammer them really hard they charge quite well look these ones went in september 2010 they were never replaced um just great batteries they were really tough now the housing for this was bigger than the housing for that with a bigger window and that housing seems to have disappeared so we could do things easily you slide the housing in the ring and the o-rings provided you with the guide and there's two plugs poking out there in the back of the housing there's the female version so you just turn it around you just says top which is top you get it then you'd line up you go yeah that's the top because it's the label on the actual housing yourself and you need to go chunk out and it's in it's done so to take it in now it was like literally a few seconds work which meant that we could take it out we could do work at all we could put it on the charger or charge those batteries up or whatever we had to do really quickly and so again the the circular case that's a it's a dc 5 volt dc converter but the whole thing is is along that lines so it works a treat now see how it rolls it's a problem at sea so and it's also a problem the trawler's often slopping around with water so what we just do is get the mini fish bin there's your carry and it stops it rolling around nice and easy um when when you had a lot of stuff in the in the lab which we did just build stocks everything sits in stocks it's there it's scary it's easy to work on do whatever there's another advantage too that when you look at a fish bin that stock fits straight into a fish bin so that's your transport as well and the cables everything all going together so you know you've got the system and when you're finished with the equipment you know that fits in there so you put a pull up with fresh water and you can drop it in and then becomes a bathroom and have things washing so it's all about sort of taking the minimum you need to take but doing the job with as many ways you can and that's just strap it down that's fine it didn't travel quite happily so that's that's the stills camera it's quite neat nice package and no superfluous space and they work like an absolute treat so then we have i'll just keep moving these other ways video camera this one i haven't got the bottom screw in fact i don't think this is the camera that was in it that's another one nine volt batteries for basic power to keep things going the handy they're fairly low resin their day i don't know what this was yeah yeah 1.5 megs effectively still 1.39 but we could fire stills out of them or we could fly a video card straight you know you're onto a for the delay for starting we also used um pressure starts too as well but mainly the timing on work best and so there it is there and if we look inside this one so open it up there's your camera in there there's no screws straight out as you can so you can do whatever you like and that's a way and again the same thing in the back the connectors are in the back there and there's the power now the things on the lens um o-rings for seals so everything is o-ringed um and two o-rings a bit of dc-4 the um the dow corning grease this perfect little steel you know just you keep it clean no grip no nothing and they work a treat um again o-rings are really well engineered because they've got just got to have just the right amount of squish now that's compression of the air in there how thick is the glass yeah well the pressure it's flat that's the trouble it's not curves the strobes are curved they're only about 12 mil um and those ones there i can't remember yeah so so that's that again as soon as this going down obviously the o-ring seals have been squished so it's improved in the seal well if the housing collapses on them yeah it's just yeah they take the pressure on the normal way as long as the water doesn't get in your form for the commercial of the housing is commercially available mate i suppose pete or chris one of those guys machined them up and we sent them why i got anodized that was done before i started on this project the same thing with the lamps the the lamps they're individual leads they're on that alloy substrate and so the whole length becomes a heat sink in the back you've got a second and they were running on 28 volts now to get the power for them i actually can bring them in um these are recycled andera current meter cases that came i think from csiro and pete cut and shut them i'll put a section in and what you've got inside oh so there's there's four lots they all come out to there we had kdex four channel charges so you just came inside when you want to run run through the charger which is after each deployment you come in plug them in the codex press the button all four channels just charge them so we could charge them i think it's about 45 minutes 50 minutes holy crap yeah so they warm up but they work a treat work really well on cold waters again the same storage quick and easy the lift comes onto this it's got a handle so you can carry buy it which i left in the back of the car i think and it had cam locks by the side to grab it under there an o-ring comes into this ring here so as it comes on it squishes harder so it's slightly different those are the face o-ring single o-ring and they were a bit of a living fact because i think they were the the weakest link out of all the housings but we had them because they were the right size and we could get the batteries that we needed tony vanessa was involved with this um tony's in holland these days but he did a lot of the engineering conjunction with the electronics workshop and the uh most of it in the instrument workshop but yeah it looked really neat really neat really easy it's number in the back three six six seven so yeah um so then they laid inside the troll so in that tube on the side that's where the batteries did so they were this high flip the lid up had a couple of gate hinges on it on the gate locks on it flip it up work them out walk inside give them a rinse off or unplug them of course and how they came off you went it's know really really unique that had to be because you were doing um virtually continuous deployments um so sort of time without giving you uh duration batteries or battery life are you talking hours oh yeah yeah like if we were doing longer stuff yeah hours um depends on how much you've got on and whether you're running all the lights or whatever but each time and we never ran them fully down the water which is about two so those batteries tolerate that quite happy um you know minus two i should say i'm thinking negative or nothing you're positive yeah um but they just worked a treat and the batteries were 30 bucks and so you can recharge those when they're cold but you can't recharge lithiums below zero really monsters two months three wet cells um there are lead acids yeah there's spirals on them yeah not sure um so we could hammer them and they worked really well because the other thing too was um if you were doing something and there was a change to the weather or a change to the situation you might suddenly discover you're not about to deploy so the ambient temperature could be minus five minus five minus ten minus twelve and these would be sitting out inside a steel housing inside stainless steel tubes and so they start to cool down pretty quickly yeah uh so you could actually grab them and take them inside or if you knew it something for an hour you just leave them they'd be fine they'd warm back up to situation when they go back because they'd go in they'd be a bit warm when they went in which gave you that sort of degree of latitude um yeah so that's sort of that area of it uh what do i miss anything no not really but do you have a look at the end the end stack there because it's an interesting earlier version of oceanography regulation and graphic electronics and i looked at a couple of date stamps i think it's probably like late 70s maybe okay so ctd this is a ctd um you've heard about some of the gear that goes in i'll see if i want to show you some of it so again if you oh we have the lights off please you can see the strings the bubbles on them and can you see the caps have kicked up there's another one too and there's caps on the bottom so the caps are open top and bottom like that like that so that's how they flush through and that's just on the way down 25 30 knots on that day yeah it looks a bit rough so looking down this is inside the c20 frame this white frame is aluminium and it's not jugal it's a compressor it's all solid bar so it's about 40 mil bar um it's all american don't ask what it's worth something ridiculous the one on the right hand side there is a downward looking finger this is one of the strobes and that's the back of the strobe with the sequin connector and the the two halves joining it up and so it's looking down so this was the system in the seated air frame that was okay as long as it was at the right focal length so that's one of those is that right yeah yeah it's one of those and there's the stills camera which is in the housing down it's in the other house i think you're sitting there down there below and as you can see up is down and makes sense when you take it out and that's the aluminium frame of the of the rosette um this is a crappy rosette photograph it's a bit out of focus and if you're looking at the color of it which is normally white that's a sunset photo or a sunrise photo but you can see and this is a trial because there's no bottles on it all the bottles have been taken off i reckon this is probably the east coast of tassie and you can see the the downward looking camera over there in this stainless frame and the connectors on top and the the actual ctd instrument is laying through there see a sort of grey instrument laying through it's about that long about that around about 100 grand yeah it's serious stuff and there's another bottom photo that we've taken with the ctd there's a fish in that one i think something cheers yeah and there's the the bottles now this is in the room where the cdd is stored normally and the door opens inside the ship now they go now you can see how the lids are cocked with the strings the strings come back to the central um mechanism that holds each of the strings and you can sequentially fire them so how they're fired is you oh because of the length of the cable you're putting about 280 volts i think it is from memory plus minus a bit into the cable because you've got to put it in on deck before the winch and it goes down through slip rings through the winch through all the wire on the drum and eventually gets to this so to power this up you've got to start with a much high voltage voltage drop you know i squared up i'm sorry sorry it's power um but think about that ir this voltage drop anyway so that's all fine and it works all very nicely but because the signals of from the ctd like the the temperature and conductivity all those signals are coming back up that cable it's a bit of a contradiction to say that you're actually firing the rosette from the top so what they do is reverse the polarity and that's so it's effectively gated off and then it fires the rosette and you just fire one each time and the mechanism rotates around and increments by one bottle at a time and you can run 24 bottles except we have the upward looking sounder and the down looking sound so we've lost the bottom and occasionally you want to take for the bios the marine buyers you want to take a bigger volume and that's just another rosette that we had on board with um massive bottles over like 50 or 60 litre bottles and they're insulated as well all the bottles have got insulated walls so that when they come back on deck you can actually get the water out and do the series of sampling without it coming up to to involve the ship temperature which in the seated rooms not much above ambient now one day i had a job to do on a russian ship that was down here and this is a hobart port out on the macquarie point it was a really yucky day it was a love job on a sad day the guy said take half an hour there all day helping him out anyway i've been on the ship doing this stuff and as i was walking along i saw this yellow container 40-footer that's pretty weird look at it and it said you know rock rpos canadian submersible that sort of attracted my attention what's this i thought yes i wonder where the submersible is and i'd walk past it i know what i was doing i'd actually walk past it and this is the submersible so as you can see it's as tall as me i would not have any idea what it's worth but it's got thrusters in every corner and all hydraulically driven and there's niskan bottles in there and that's you know all bits and pieces hydraulics everywhere it's just amazing and there's so the niska bottles for sampling water you can see a couple in here and there's a couple laying over there and everywhere you look it's just jam-packed inside this frame with thrusters and mechanical arms for going out it's like something out of science fiction so you know it's real bottom of the harbour stuff fantastic and there's all the cameras and it's got look at fingers looking up and fingers looking down and she was on and it was a like a non-profit um some guy decided he wanted to do oceanography and had hired the ship and recruited all these people and i'm going around the world i go to antarctica i don't know the full background of it never heard or seen anything about it again but like you know you sort of go wow that's pretty amazing now yeah we were talking earlier about the blanking plugs right if you look here this says science jc jc jb jb junction box size junction box now off the bottom here you can see cables going in it's going to be hard to see let's see these ones where they go nowhere they're the plugs so that's that's how you can configure the whole thing up and put into sensors than you want to do so um yeah you so the system is really simple if there's there's cecon there under some instrument there's a couple of seconds there so the yeah this is industry set this thing would be the sort of stuff you'd use for inspecting right now underwater cables or oil rigs or something it's like it's a serious bit of gear and it probably weighed i don't know a ton of something oh yeah it's just chuckle block and it's like hydraulic motors hydraulic rams hydraulically driven thrusters yeah pretty amazing bit of gear quite impressed yeah i know just like wouldn't you hate it if the hydraulic failed halfway through the bottom of the water or you lost your string no longer attached i don't know whether it was fully remoted whether it was actually operated tethered and actually find the information um this is a whale listener some of you have seen this image before um they come in from the states and we've got whale guys and they they all run down to about 1800 metres i think and you lower them down to the bottom they sit on the bottom they record whale sounds and they're good for two years from memory and in here is a lump of steel each end that wire there is a fusing wire so they've got battery packs to run the electronics and when you want to release them you come over the top of the ship so theoretically you know where they are you'll have to latin long gear mark the point on the plotter and you hit a code so each one's got an individual code you fire the code in the pinger in the bottom of the ship pings up with that code and it'll respond then you know it's alive which is always a good day and you're over and then you'll put in the fire code and the fire code puts the battery power through the fusible links the fusible links go open circuit the weights fall off and it comes back to the surface there's a couple of tricks because the ocean's stratified and you get different thermal layers in the ocean you can be sometimes sitting over and you have to ping it for quite a while before you actually get it to respond because the signal is getting attenuated just like you know it's very variations uh and then the other thing is because it comes up sorry abducting you exactly the yellow covers spherical boys strongest boys glass boys in there so that's your buoyancy and they come up like really really slow oh and and of course because you've got currency currents in the water column you basically get everybody on deck and say watch for this thing and they only float with about that much of the look oh you know like they're hard to find and every time i've been involved we've got them back we did have one once and didn't want to talk to us so we just left it it's still there did you ever get in with us she have you ever lost any ctds no but i know people have string failure uh i can't remember i'll follow you it doesn't matter ultimately the string must have broken yeah yeah another attached and that's one getting deployed yeah oh if you throw it over the side of the ship you've got to assume you lose it that's that's the bottom rule of marine science you know there's one going down yeah so quite neat um this is an american project that was on board and this is an array of gear that has the things in the background with the with a tripod sort of frame over the top they sat on the bottom and all these other things went up through the water column and those those are actually glass boys to provide um support for all of the gear that was hung down below so they had a series of essential acoustic sensors so i have corrected him and the wire they were suspended on was something like six or eight hundred meters long and they had other instruments that actually walked up and down the wire like koalas going up and down a post doing sampling at different levels um but this is another one that was a bit problematic they'd done a firmware upgrade on the crawlers some months before and they the guy that did them um i don't know i've never met him said yeah it's all fine it'll work perfectly and not all of them worked only some of them went up and down the other one stayed stationary for the year yeah that was a yeah so look yeah slowly every industry has its values every industry has its bonuses but i think anything that you do in the ocean and you get back is you know it's quite remarkable um one of the labs on australis there's another australis photo for you pretty typical of labs always really crowded because there's so many people working in there gear everywhere and all this gear comes gear comes out at the end of the voyage in a few days because the ship's got to go and do its next village so it normally takes you longer to set it up than take it out i like the sign in the back on one of the photos and one of the power boxes yeah dude i'll drill here you do need something that'd be would that be less problematic with naina because it's owned by the difference um it's harvey martin he's a a buyer um yes or no because because loin is so much bigger there's going to be more franchising of science like um sometimes you'll have 10 different countries represented on the ship yeah and and so they'll bring their gear with them and or you'll have students coming in to do support for somebody else's you know they're doing phd work supporting another project that might come from university on the mainland or the university overseas so yes and no yeah as always you know you'll probably get three or four days to set the ship up before the season or before the voyage and then you get a bit more time you know to get it off occasionally we have to make things on the spot and this was a turns counter for the uh one of the winches on deck that didn't have a turn scanner so it was a tiny tiger in a plastic bottle with a sensor and a magnet glued onto the drum a lady came along with an adcp and it's an acoustic doppler current profiler so it sits on the bottom and looks up and measures pings and kind of looks for the variation in the return pin because of the modification due to the velocity of water anyway she didn't bring enough batteries and it was a fairly long voice we said i think we can fix this so we went and ran it around because we knew we had even nine belt cells and just wired up even from nine volts series oh i can't remember the series parallel i can't remember what the voltage but we just worked out what we needed and you know it was rough as guts but it worked she was happy and she i think we did two stacks for her she finished the voyage but yeah that's the difference here yeah they can either sit there and twiddle their thumbs going if only or you say well that's all we can do well i think we put the nine volts together that's hilarious now cables here we go this cable which you should have a look at in a little while there's if you ever have to do a join of a cable that needs to be waterproof like say you've got an antenna controller or something and you just want to do a lash up job you can use these and they'll last a fair while they're crimps you can get them from rs and other people and there's three sizes there's green pinky reds and blues and each one represents a wire size and you strip off the cable so this is a ct cable so there's the that's the return the outer uh you can see the the two layers the left hand spiral right hand spiral which is that cable there and that's the center conductor that the data comes back up in and the initiation signals for firing the balls goes down and everything's powered through so you crimp it up now there is a divider in the middle here you just see a little indent there there's some in the car i'll go so you need a set of crimping jaws that are only half width you know like most of the ones they have the two crimps you have the one that goes over the insulation and one goes over the connector these only have half so you crimp one side and then you put your wire in the that's that's looking vertically at it you put your wire in the other side and you crimp the other side and then because they heat shrinkable hot glue you just heat shrink them down and they'll seal on the conductor and they'll last some time so um if we're really pressed which we have been and we haven't got time to cure them now this is something too that would also cross over mama radio that's a section of history and we have to bond from the cable going down to the ctd which is the sort of cable to the actual metallic cable with that single liner conductor so you join up in fact that's what this job was you join it up inside you have your rubber cable or your heat string onto it this is glued heat shrink it's about probably real 32 mil 30 35 mil goes down to 12 mil so you shrink the bottom for about 50 mil it comes down to the cable that gives you a waterproof seal because it's not like we're talking a waterproof seal because it's gripped onto the rubberized cable and then we put potting compound in which is polyurethane leave it taped up to whatever taped up to for 12 hours and that will do um if it's done properly and everything's clean that'll do a season of ctds wow um so that's maybe 100 deployments 140 deployments and we also use it for a cable that's about that thick on the rmt gets done at the start of the season sits on deck does the deployments on the rmt and you chop it off at the end of the season they just don't fail so if you if you did have to do something in the field or at home you could use a system like that um for doing it like an antenna rotator cable and you'd put it on so that the that section was facing down after it's cured of course the belt it comes down like a bell like come down like actually i didn't do this one they cut off too shortly um i normally leave them up the cable for about 50 mil 40mm 50mm so for a good seal and then it comes down like a belt and the the actual potting compounded so for radio purposes works a treat yeah that's a way of doing it now if we go back a bit i have done them um when you've really been pushed for time you haven't got time to pot it with vulcanizing tape does anybody here use vulcanizing tape yep okay okay this is that's scotch tape it's not cheap but it's a rubberized tape that self amalgamates so that's great so it has a plastic coating on the back and as you you started you stretch it by about 30 or 40 percent this is a bit gungy because it's been sitting around but as you wrap up it actually joins onto itself and it bonds and it becomes a solid layer of rubber and so you spiral just you start it up put it like a double layer on where you start and then just go around you over you stretch and overlap by about fifteen all the way around and you spiral down then you turn around and spiral back up and you pull it in tight to the bit where you started hold it and it'll grip on and then a double layer of i've got two i'm going to squash these three a double layer of scotch 33 black vinyl tape will be fine and you can do you'll get if you get it so there's no void and if there's voids in the water can get in if you get it so it's really tight um and then the melter makes up you'll get maybe 10 drops for the c2d right you know down to down to substantial depth a couple of thousand liters so it's good stuff it's so it's a primary solution if you need to waterproof things you know if you had to oh just an application i've used it i've used that stuff on and um you couldn't make it float by antennas yeah then the the temple around the outside yeah catch thank you antenna i use that stuff on the outside now once we talk connectors and waterproof connectors these are amphenol c-16s um they're a bit expensive but you can find the right look today and there's some around for 10 bucks each so they're the bulkhead fittings and you know past those around and these are the they're multi-pin and these are only fourteen four pin are rated to 10 amps per pin and there's a couple of styles they're really good because they incorporate no ring and we use them on the ship outside we use them for automatic weather stations they just last and last they're not affected by uv so again for things like antenna rotators or whatever you screw them up and they just seal because they they have o-rings in them they seal together but better still if you're doing something like in field work or whatever you're going to disconnect and reconnect they come with a male and female cap so you you take your cable to a female cap on each end you know your cable's in track intact and it's going to be clean the next time we want to use it and where your bulk is coming out that's actually a slightly different style with the bulkhead comes out you screw in the plug type cap for the um for the bulkhead the same story but it's not the sort of thing you'd go and buy on a whim but if you're actually going to build something and design it and modern know it lasts for 20 odd years or whatever or you might have to shift it in the future they're really really good so ethanol c16s but there are some other copies around but like some people say 50 bucks each but i saw some on ebay today that were new they'd look at home tonight no we're 10 bucks each and you can get where can you buy them from rs is one of them okay farnell element 40 or yeah just look around amphenol c-16 multi-pin connectors um but i just if you think you're going to use them let's keep an eye open get something you can afford something with some of the cheaper prices so bulkheads my old bulkheads female plugs male and female and caps capsule plugs and they're all interchangeable so if you made your cables so that the same pin was the same at each end you could reverse your cables or whatever because it'll be just continuous straight through so good thing okay finished before you bore you much more um other sort of stuff we do is it's a portable comps package with hf and vhf marine and vhf airbnb and a solar panel sitting on a power distribution box that was an a-cap it's a deep photo it was a project about 15 years ago this is a repeater uh hendo i think up above mawson so that's a fair way up five glass box solar panels on two sides and it's fairly old because i can't remember that might be a kl repeater uh looking at their clothes that's another uh no that's uh bourgeois it's an island with a penguin it's a kim newbury project and it's got uh wi-fi back to mawson solar panels that are very cool yeah yeah that's really common uh lighthouses too um they've been doing it like that for probably 30 years in queensland because of all the bird poop dog bird poop um if it's vertical it'll wash off yeah and what they find is it's all over the ground as well so the ground's white it reflects so they get just as much light bouncing onto the panels as they would if they tilted them but if they were tilted they'd be covered in poopy pretty quickly and it'll be a bad day especially with the modern solar panels that don't actually need the yeah so and also with snow around uh you've got a lot of reflected light as well snow is uh what's the word there's a word for reflectivity and snow's at the top of the list snow and ice crystals okay here we go this is 1950 odd well i've just found all fire [Music] um davis hi no i'll give you a call back in the morning bye i love it i love it one of my friends actually he's he's a dentist house renovator we've known him for years and malcolm has got into valve radios like out of the 30s and 40s he knows nothing about electronics he's learning but it's quite amusing so uh recently the radio there was a restoring vault radio book here from uh ea or silicon chip or something what years ago anyway i took that along to russell to knock him the other day he said he'd read this blah blah okay um the see the transmitter on the right on the left-hand side of the wall with the panel on the front of it i reckon it's an art 15 which was an aviation collins um am transmitted about 100 watts and the one next to it i think is a helicopter sx 28 which is sort of at the end of the war this photo is maybe 57 i think look at my notes um and this is a bit of a classic so this is the telex days which weren't really that far away for a lot of some of you probably ever seen italics but if you read down so it's um vnj that's the station and it's from iceberg and now it says second of february 86.

[01:00:21]you know i don't know what nr 84 is or ck035 not the position i think so 2306 net it's a time and that the next one's the distribution list for logs whatever that is don't know that manning's successfully transformed passengers into zombies yeah oh i see all stations voice leader in melbourne yeah and then you go down a bit further i um i found some old document came back from station and i had to flick through it a few of them were quite good so i did that so this other one's um davis again oit is a horse race not a kingston beach hub pub drinking race yeah that's graham i wouldn't mind beating it's grand thomas curry who used to be vk zero gc he just went back after time and time and time again he had a camper van the station used to go holiday in the states and come back and go back to antarctica i don't know who this peter dude is um yeah but if um ellen was here he'd probably tell us but you get that and it was all sort of yeah it was all factual and everything was happening um yeah and like you know 13 knots 13.5 knots at speed 36 hours continuous rolling so she was probably where was she 5503e so it's 55 degrees south that's at least it's south and 112 10 east so she's well loose because we're one forty whatever we are and forty forty three okay forty three forty seven houston is part of australia's 150. yeah so so she's well well away she'd be out in the south indian ocean out there someone probably coming back from mawson maybe so she'd roll like a dog going down any questions [Laughter] um [Laughter] relationships is um funded they're made by uh um do we really want to do this um is um one of the scientists stated everything is so verbal uh okay [Laughter] um is um uh oh um uh um hmm is oh okay [Laughter] so he's in charge that chain in the front was like a particular chain in case there was some big nasty rock poking up so but actually pictures that's featured there you go three sizes at 5.6 anyway can we show our appreciation you