The purpose of this contract is the upgrade, enhancement and to standardize the transceivers designed for use at Bonneville Dam Powerhouse-2 Corner Collector (B2CC) in order to provide maximum accuracy, uptime and reliability of the Bonneville Corner Collector PIT Tag interrogation equipment.

B2CC is an important data collection site for researchers in the Columbia River Basin (CRB). In the effort to minimize downtime and/or degraded interrogation performance, standardization and optimization of the transceivers is imperative. In the event of a malfunction, an optimally performing transceiver must be available for immediate deployment. The performance of the system is measured by “hits per tag” (the number of times a PIT Tagged fish is successfully read as it passes through the B2CC antenna), along with “read range” (how far from the antenna a PIT Tag will start to be read). PSMFC working with DA and NMFS has established minimum standards for these performance parameters. When a transceiver falls below these standards, we need to have a replacement transceiver ready to install that meets the standards. This is essential if the site is to maintain the integrity of the data that PTAGIS collects for the fisheries community.

The B2CC transceivers are the most technologically advanced in the world; their development was necessary to enable detections in the huge antenna (17’ by 17’) that surrounds the exit flume of the corner collector at the Bonneville Dam. There are four transceivers, but each is unique because they were researched and developed as incremental prototypes and were improved during the development process. The B2CC transceivers are not in production.

In order to detect the modulation of a 12-mm tag in such a large antenna, these transceivers need to be more sensitive than the ones located at other PIT Tag monitoring sites throughout the Columbia River Basin. Unfortunately, a byproduct of that sensitivity is that these transceivers sometimes record PIT Tag codes that are not always real, as environmental electromagnetic noise sometimes produces a pattern that meets the basic definition of a tag. In an attempt to limit the number of these nonsense or spurious tag codes from being recorded in the permanent data files collected at the site, PSMFC has written a custom version of MiniMon (the PTAGIS data collection software). This non-standard version of MiniMon presents a maintenance burden, diverting PTAGIS software engineers from their tasks. The B2CC transceiver’s weaknesses need to be overcome so that PTAGIS software engineers only need to maintain one production version of MiniMon for use in the CRB. An attempt will be made to minimize and/or eliminate spurious tags as stated with Software Item #6.
Enhancing the remote control capabilities of the B2CC transceiver would also be beneficial. This would translate into increased uptime and potentially more PIT Tag detections. It also would translate into lower maintenance costs, as the number of visits by personnel having to travel to the site would be reduced.