Dear PASSCAL community,
After a careful review of the usage and support requirements for the RefTek 125-A single channel recording systems (a.k.a. “Texans”), the PASSCAL Standing Committee and IRIS Management - with input from the Seismic Source Facility Advisory committee and approval from the IRIS Board of Directors - have made the difficult decision to begin the transition of support for these instruments with the goal of removing them from the SAGE PASSCAL capabilities.
This was not an easy decision, as the Texans have been used with great effect in the past. Unfortunately, we no longer have the ability to continue to repair these instruments as they are well past RefTek’s “End-of-Life”, and we have exhausted our limited supplies. In addition, with the move of our Texan instrument requests to the newer and much more capable nodal technologies, we have seen a dramatic fall-off in experiments requiring these instruments and no Texan experiment funded in over a year. We have asked the PASSCAL Instrument Center (PIC) to concentrate its support on the newer nodal systems, and will be working with our available funding to grow the node pool to surpass the current Texan capabilities.
Transition Plan:
The SAGE program has already removed support for the 400 Texans supported by UTEP as of October 2019, and those funds are now allocated to support the Seismic Source Facility. For the ~2,200 Texans at the PIC, we plan to no longer commit to support any future Texans in proposals after 1 October, 2020. Further, we will remove the entire fleet from the PASSCAL pool on 1 June, 2021. At that point, the instruments will be disposed of as per IRIS/NSF inventory procedure. The Texans currently at UTEP remain the property of the State of Texas, that will determine the final disposition of those 400 systems.
We thank all the past Texan users for their use of this capability. It’s now time, however, to move to newer, more efficient and effective technologies.
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.
Beatrice Magnani
Kent Anderson
Chair, PASSCAL Standing Committee
IRIS Portable Program Manager
Magnani, Maria Beatrice
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