Transmissions from CMRC3 ended abruptly last Sunday evening at 10pm EDT (Monday at 200 hours UTC). This was approximately four and a half days after our last visit (Wednesday morning) during the recent maintenance trip.
The most likely suspect is a failure of the transmitter or its cables and antennae. CMRC3 transmissions, including datalogger and transmitter diagnostics, were entirely normal up until the time of failure. The final transmission had 53 of 75 reported fields present and the rest was ascii garbage, but instrument counts and diagnostics indicate that the station was operating normally during that last hour before transmitting.
Therefore there's reason to hope that the station continues to operate silently and is recording its data to the station's memory module. The Shallow-CTD was of course offline but it, too, records its data to flash memory and we expect to retrieve those data in the next trip.
The next maintenance trip will involve troubleshooting the transmitter problem and running a new cable for the Shallow CTD.
-- Mike Jankulak