Ninth Field Trip to Alice Holt Forest
Luigi’s guerrilla visit
Luigi went on Saturday, 3 August 2024, to set up Giorgio in the new meadow with the new audio cables and a foldable portable solar panel 100 Watt. The unit still has the old sign, which will be fine-tuned at the end of August. The streamer worked perfectly well with this new setup, including the O2 SIM card, and the sonic material is good enough for what we intend. We might have found the perfect spot!
Then, Luigi moved to the Willows Green trail to check Pete’s installation (which was working fine!) and fixed Streamer II Paula. This entailed fully charging the EcoFlow unit using AC charging (grid charging) and securing it to the tree with a new lock. The intention was to see how long the battery lasts and then decide whether to buy multiple solar panels, possibly going for a more DIY direction, similar to Giorgio’s approach.
Anna’s guerrilla visit
On Monday, 5 August 2024, I went to check both streamers and the installation as well as record some sounds from both sites for research purposes.
Streamer I Giorgio status
The live stream from Giorgio has been working with no interruption since Luigi set it up on Saturday, 5 August 2024 (2 full days), and bugs seem to embrace it! I even saw a baby deer passing by.
I recorded an audio extract of about 5 minutes to start getting a feel of this natural soundscape. I also took some notes on how the signs can be improved to let casual visitors what this setup is about.
Streamer II Paula and Dendrophone status
Pete’s installation was working wonderfully well and standalone with the two solar panels. I recorded a few audio extracts of about 5 minutes to also get a sense of this modified soundscape.
While Giorgio worked from Saturday to Monday with no interruption, the day after Luigi’s visit and before my visit, Paula stopped working. My visit would be meaningful to debug why. Until we get the three systems stable enough, and capture common reasons for failure, we cannot document how to maintain them and ask for help from Forestry England.
As shown in the photo below, the dongle’s antenna was upside down, and the streamer’s button was switched off. Likely a kid made it all.
The assumption here is that the height of the tripod was too close to the children’s hand reach, so I heightened the tripod to its maximum position, moved the tripod closer to the tree and moved the dongle as far as possible from the tree to avoid any obstacle for the 4G dongle’s antenna to work.
Regarding the status of the EcoFlow battery, it was at 65%, probably because the streamer was switched off, so I decided to leave it as it was. As shown in the photo below, the output from the streamer was 2W/hour. For some reason, the solar power input was zero, but the day was not very sunny and thought I would continue monitoring the battery’s behaviour within the next days including another field trip on the following week and Pete’s visit on Thursday this week.
I left with the two systems working. It is great to be able to test the links to the two streamers while walking back to the train station. More monitoring is needed, but hopefully, we are reaching a more stable situation with lighter monitoring checks.
Follow-up
Pete will go on Thursday to add two more solar panels to his Dendrophone installation. This might provide enough energy to fully power the installation, which would be incredible! I will return next week to continue monitoring the two streamers and installation and capture a few more audio recordings. We are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel!