Something changed with the antenna from the time we used it in Colombia to the time I set it up in Port-au-Prince. When I set the antenna up the first day, September 2, it was at the Boat Landing Zone, right next to the harbor. I was able to get a good receive signal, but when I was working with the NOC to bring the system onto the network I was not able to achieve a cross polarization isolation value that was acceptable (only 15 db). On September 3 I tried moving the feed location and that sill didn't help. At Paul Gierow's suggestion to move away from the water, I moved the antenna to a different location at the Boat Landing Zone. That helped, and when I called the NOC, Paul Gierow was on the conference call, working with me to try to isolate the problem. We were still only able to get 21 db of cross polarization isolation.

On September 3 I set up the backup antenna that I had brought. Again, I set it up in the second location, away from the water. At this point I delayed calling the NOC for an hour or so, while arranged for more minutes on my satellite phone. When I finally made the call, I worked with the NOC and Loral to adjust then feed polarization, and we were able to get 23.5 db of cross pol isolation. The Loral tech rounded that up to 24 db, the bare minimum to come onto the network. They activated us on the network, watched power settings for a while. When they determined that we weren't causing interference, they allowed us to stay on the network.

We used the GATR and the Asus wireless router to provide connectivity to the Groove laptops for five hours on September 4 and for seven hours on September 5. Both of those days we ran the system on generator, because the Haitian electric company, EDH, was so unreliable. On the last day we ran the system with five laptops connected via wireless. I did some testing of uploading and downloading large files.