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Been A Blur

Let's see...I think it was August 14 that I last wrote anything. That would have been the day we were underway from Peru. When I woke up on Wednesday morning and went up to breakfast, I went outside to see that we were in Ecuador. We had docked some time before 5:00 AM. During my years of living in Ecuador, I had never been to Manta. One thing that struck me as I looked across the harbor were the size of the fishing boats. Quite large, and I guess they are tuna boats. The ship is pierside here, and that makes it easy to do our work here. That is, as opposed to being a couple miles off shore, as we were in Peru, and as we will be in Colombia.

Wednesday morning I scouted for a place to set up the GATR VSAT antenna, and then after lunch I went to work. Fortunately there was a good view to the east right off the end of the pier, and nothing blocking the view. We have a low look angle here of 15 degrees. I was surprised by the fact that there was quite a strong wind blowing down the pier. After I got the antenna pointed, I gave the NOC a call and things looked OK. However, upon finishing with them, we couldn't do anything with the Internet. I called back and we spent some time on the phone and then I changed to a more powerful transmitter. But before I had time to try again, I ran out of time. Some success, but not as much as we needed.

Thursday morning I went to the Angelica Flores school, the site for one of two clinics being run by the Comfort here in Manta. I had asked to be able to scout the two sites on Wednesday, so I could go to the one that would have the best location for the VSAT antenna. I wasn't able to do that, but fortunately there was a perfect location at the Angelica Flores school--on top of the roof of the office building. It was the only location in the whole school that would work. It was noon before we were able to be operational, but it took the network provider a little while to figure out the problem that had kept us off the Internet on Wednesday afternoon. At that point the communications for the clinic were channeled through the GATR connection, and the expensive BGAN was given a break.

Friday was pretty much a repeat of Thursday, with the exception that it only took me an hour to get set up, point the antenna at the satellite, and get online. The clinic communications operated for eight hours on the GATR connection. Unfortunatley the Comfort mission communications is using Microsoft Groove, and only able to use the chat feature because of bandwidth contraints at both the remote sites and the ship. The GATR antenna is more suited to video conferencing, transferring large video and data files, and voice calls. If all the sites had a GATR antenna, that would be great. But we are here to experiment, and help support the mission as well.

Today was another day of work, even though it is the weekend. We set up and used the GATR at the school again, as well as a 1 kilowatt solar system which we experimented with throughout the day. So far I've been very pleased with our success and progress. Tonight I'm looking forward to hitting the sack, as the past three days have been 11 or 12 hour days and were started at 5 AM.

The clinic has been amazing to watch. People are lined up outside in the sun for hours and hours, waiting for an opportunity to come inside and receive some health care. Dental, opthamology, ob-gyn, pediatrics, adult medicine are all cranking along all day. As people enter they are referred to one of these areas, and then vitals are taken. After seeing the doctor, if needed they do lab work, and there is a pharmacy for those who need meds. Cases that need surgery, and can be accomodated, are sent to the ship. Tonight we have about 50 patients on board.

That's it for me for tonight. Tomorrow we'll probably set the GATR antenna up on the pier again.

Posted by David at August 18, 2007 07:32 PM