Start Soldering

July 6th, 2010

Got to go to the electronics shop yesterday! I've designed my circuit, now I get to hope that it all works right...

To better explain: the time varying magnetic fields at our several MT-monitoring stations have been varying in time. That's not saying much. But! They show different long term trends at different locations -- So aside from normal changes in the earth's total magnetic field, there might be something to be learned about the plate tectonics here along the San Andreas Fault. While this is something I will be thinking about and dabbling in, my main goal right now (as discussed and set out by my advisors) is to make sure that our magnetic recording equipment is calibrated equally across the stations. To do that, I'm working on a circuit that will output a varying current at a given sine-wave frequency (low, 1-10Hz), then hooked up to a large coil to produce a magnetic field. Since my magnetic field is a known quantity (or will be known, once I test it), I can then see if the magnetic coils buried in the field are picking up the same thing. 

Another possible method for this suggested by Simon, is to look at an incoming teleseism (from far away). Since shaking the ground moves our monitoring coils through the earth's magnetic field, we get a signal (a pseudo-seismometer).  Since the teleseism should affect all of them the same, unlike all the rest of the data that comes from very local noise, we can find out if the stations' data are at least on the same page (same order of magnitude). We'll see! So far I have only just begun by playing with downloading seismic data both with breq_fast and SOD (with help from grad-students and our very own Kelsey).