Conception, verification and application of innovative techniques to study active volcanoes, Edited by Warner Marzocchi e Aldo Zollo, ISBN 978-88-89972-09-0, 2008.
S. Guardato, G. Iannaccone
In this technical report, we present an electronic interface that we designed and produced as part of a new system that allows the remote acquisition of data provided by the GPS receiver for the Quanterra Q330 and Q330HR dataloggers, and for the whole range of the Altus series of systems produced by Kinemetrics, using an RS-485 bus via a serial cable that can be of kilometres in length. This function is not normally available for any of the equipment reported and it is needed when the installation of the GPS receiver antenna needs to be more than some tens of metres from the datalogger. This can be necessary, for example, for installations in tunnels, in large buildings, or for seafloor systems with a cable connection to the surface. This document describes the functioning and the hardware of the interface boards, particularly considering the Quanterra Q330 datalogger. The system designed in this way is introduced as an element that maintains all of the functions of the apparatus in a fully transparent mode without the need to modify the communication-software procedures for the exchange of data between the datalogger and the integrated GPS receiver, therefore leaving untouched the various functional modalities normally associated with the GPS receiver.