SALCA was finally delivered back to Halo Photonics, 2 hours down the M6 to Worcester. A useful discussion with Guy Pearson ironed out the amends that need to be completed on SALCA, which include:
1) Repositioning of the laser beams or over-rotation of SALCA to eliminate a blind spot that we have discovered.
2) Tweaking of beam magnitude in order to use only 1 ND filter. This will remove the need to perform consequent scans for each wavelength and will therefore greatly increase the quality of our data collection.
3) Installation of a more powerful digitiser that we are hoping will help toward speed SALCA up, either by continuous rotation of the head (without pause for download), or by the increased memory capacity, which would enable one single download at the end of a scan.
4) Investigation into SALCA beam power loss over time.
5) A more permanent mount designed to the amended filter angle, which should allow us to use and change filters on SALCA more easily.
Meanwhile, myself, Mark and Rachel attended the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society Conference 2011 last week in Bournemouth, where Mark and Rachel were both well received in presenting the progress we have made, both practically and scientifically with the SALCA project, paying particular attention to the fieldwork completed and also the progress made with our moisture loss experiments.
Provisionally, we are hoping to retrieve SALCA in early October, which means we will have time to run more calibration tests before taking the scanner back to Delamere to try to catch the leaf off process, which should provide us with more useful phenological data.
Oliver Gunawan
19th September 2011
