Troubleshooting

The deck unit current is not stable and below 40 mA

Deck unit voltage should be below 40 mA. If it goes above, this may result in displaying Error or similar, or the deck unit turning off (not entirely sure).

• The first suspect culprit here would be faulty cable termination.

• On a previous occasion, an issue like this was solved by removing the chlorophyll sensor (we now do not typically mount this sensor).

Diagnostics

Connect directly from the deck units to the profiler using a short cable (bypassing the winch).

• Current should not be the same as when using a long functioning winch cable, but if it is stable and well below 40 mA that indicates something wrong in the data cable (including deck and ocean cables, their terminations and the winch slipring).

  • ➡ Diagnose the cable and reterminate if necessary.

• Is the problem persists, the problem is likely in the instrument electronics.

  • ➡ Switch to a spare instrument if available..

Note

Even when working correctly, expect slightly different current readings from:

• Different deck units

• Different profiles

There is a data stream, but the indicator light is red

This means that data are coming through, but not all measurements are classified as good data.

Measurements are done at high frequency (512 or 1024 Hz?), but data displayed in the software are subsampled every second.

There may therefore be bad samples between the samples displayed in the software.

We would see this in post-processing, where we use a threshold of “maximum bad samples” until we no longer confidently fit a spectrum.

Tip

To be on the safe side, it is good to run a quick preliminary processing of data after collection in order to check that things work well.