Lab work with Students

I'm spending time this summer with MS students Thomas Liner (blue shirt) and John Guist (red hat). Recently we had a day in the lab trying to get the EM–31 conductivity meter figured out. Thomas worked through every manual we have and found out that batteries were dead or depleted, the system had been stored with power on, and we were missing some software on the PC. 

After a drydock experiment in the lab, we took it out in front of Ozark Hall for a couple of test lines. Returning to the lab we realized we were stuck, so a quick call to Geonics support quickly resolved the issues.

It turns out to get data off the recorder, you have to undo two screws and remove the GPS attachment, then I'm due to more screws with a special screwdriver, remove the top of the unit, and withdraw a flash memory card. With a common camera accessory the flash memory card go to USB and files can be brought to the computer. The raw file format has extension R31 which must be converted  in the PC  software to a G31 extension file before plotting. Not exactly an automatic process. But within a few minutes we had a plot of our conductivity profile with GPS coordinates. Eureka!