Nice Work on a Sunday Morning

Lars Poulsen - 2024-12-22

Qaanaaq - A Very Peculiar Place

Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, is a United States Space Force base located on the northwest coast of Greenland. It is the northernmost installation of the U.S. Armed Forces... (Wikipedia)

This is about half-way between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole.

When Thule Air Base was first built in 1943 and then moved a bit and expanded in 1951, the existing Inuit village was demolished, and the population of about 130 forcibly relocated to a newly constructed village called "New Thule" or Qaanaaq.

CTBTO - A Somewhat Peculiar Organization

When a number of countries signed The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the United Nations set up an office to construct a way to verify that nobody sets off nuclear bombs in violation of the treaty. This is the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), which is housed in the United Nations building complex in Vienna, Austria. They have built a network of around 200 monitoring stations, located in quiet locations around the world. These monitoring stations are located in places where they won't confused by the ordinary noises of civilized life, such as trucks driving on highways.

To maintain these systems, a number of specialized contractors are on retainers to build and service the equipment. In order to ensure neutrality, these are from different countries. We have worked with such companies from France, Ireland, Canada and ... even the USA.

My company provides local communications network radios to these contractors.

These stations are all located in fairly peculiar places. My business partner Nuno has been of field trips to

and we have provided remote assistance to teams in or on I invite you to look up some of these locations on Wikipedia and Google Maps.

"Santa Barbara, we have a problem"

The station at Qaanaaq was refurbished this year. One of the radios failed after about 6 weeks of operation. The transmitter side of the radio became too weak to communicate reliably. The Danish staff member that had supervised the installation had the local technician (who I suspect is the village school teacher) replace the radio with a spare unit and send the failed unit to my office. But the replacement also failed 6 weeks later. We have not yet received it, but we suspect the failures are identical, which is highly unusual. The Dane joked that maybe a polar bear had somehow gotten too close, but my suspicion is effects of Aurora Borealis. Anyway, the third unit is working fine. Meanwhile the Dane has rotated out of the Vienna office, replaced by a Spaniard, who is now finally up to speed and has started checking out the particular network node. The radio links are working well, but some telemetry data about the radio itself are messed up.

It took a couple of days, before I had time to look in detail at the "data dump" (a 6000+ line text file), but this fine Sunday morning, when I woke up at 5, I took a look at the data, and discovered that the problematic radio was the only one of the 11 of our radios in the network that was running an old version of the radio firmware. It happened to be the last version before we expanded the telemetry feature of the radio to provide access to the radio-specific data. Clearly, the radios on the spare parts shelf had not been updated in the last 4 years.

So I recommended that they update the firmware per the instructions in our user manual.

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I tell this story as an example of the extraordinary collaborations that are possible with modern technology: A Spaniard in Austria remotely logs in to a scientific radio network in Greenland, installed by a Dane using equipment built in Santa Barbara, California.

And our company (Afar Communications, Inc) that provides the radios is run by two immigrants: A Dane and a Portuguese, both now naturalized American citizens.

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