Mr. Gray spent five days at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and coordinated the testing and integration of the Iridium constellation into the GCI. He assisted the deployment of equipment and supervised the trial operation. The monitoring station sent test data into the CTBTO communication network through a communications hub in Denver, Colorado, USA.
In Vienna, data traffic from the station at the South Pole was closely monitored. A team of CTBTO personnel comprising IMS and IDC staff were on stand-by in Vienna to observe data reception and provide feed-back on data transmission.
Since February 2007 the new communication installation is in place. Full coverage of the station AS114 is now possible and data from the station are available in Vienna on a 24-hour basis.
The installation of a monitoring station with functioning communication links is always a challenging task. Some stations are built in such difficult locations that they put the ingenuity and creativity of the technical experts to the test. Auxiliary seismic station AS114 is one of these stations. Despite its climatic extremes and its remoteness, the station is now integrated in the global net of CTBTO international monitoring stations through a dedicated communication set-up. It now fulfills the requirement under the CTBT to send data continuously in near real-time to the International Data Centre in Vienna.