Whenever I see one of these on Drudge:
I check it out at the
National Data Buoy Center. It's one of the things our government did well and I was once a tiny cog in the corporate machine that sold these buoys to Australia and some other Pacific rim countries. Did you know they're putting actual cameras on the buoys so you can see what the ocean looks like in the middle of nowhere?
The buoys are an apt but succinct description of life at sea. The batteries only last a few years before they need to be replaced which means a ship has to visit each buoy every couple of years to swap out the batteries and every so often to refurbish the buoy and replace the batteries located on the bottom of the sea in 20,000 feet of water.
So like anything else, if you want one of these buoys to work all the time, you need to buy at least two and be willing to pay $50,000/day to send a working ship out there that can service the buoys for you. As you click on the various DART buoys at the website you can see where some of them have gone dark. It's like finding your sentries asleep at their posts with the enemy just over there, waiting.
1 comment:
I found it amazing what technicians could make in a giant echoing mostly empty warehouse of a building with nothing but fairly common tools. Pressure vessels with penetrations that can withstand the pressures at the bottom of the ocean. It was humdrum amazing stuff.
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