Hello All,
I’m curious about an issue we recently encountered with antenna ports and needing to change ports. We had a USB port fail on one our sensor stations, and in an effort to keep all the antenna’s running without changing the computer we moved two antennas. The first antenna went into an unused port and the second antenna went into the port vacated by the first antenna. We then updated the motus website with the new port mapping. We did not realize at the time that this would create a problem with the receiver metadata on the Sql after a force meta command. Now, the historical detections from first antenna (prior to the swap) have the antenna information (type, height, and bearing) of the second antenna. And the second antenna’s information is now represented by both of the ports it has occupied.
We have since replaced the computer and changed the antenna array at this station and therefore have a new device and deployment ID. But for future cases my question is if it is best practice to end a deployment and start a new one if there are any changes to the port mapping mid-deployment, even if the computer stays the same? Changing ports at the time was the only solution in the field we had to keep the station running during fall migration, and we were limited by what we had available port-wise and cable length-wise (for which ports we could actually reach with the cables we had). The swap only affects a few weeks worth of detections, and so the metadata is easy to more manually adjust after the fact for our project. But in case this happens again, what is recommended for a situation like this?
Thank you,
Mary Scofield
MPG Ranch
Avian Science Team