The MBAR station is located in Mbarara, Uganda. It is a NASA/JPL sponsored installation deployed in March of 2001. The GPS system is co-located with seismic instrumentation owned and operated by the Scripps/International Deployment of Accelerometers (IDA) project. The GPS system is also augmented with a MET-Pack. The equipment is running off two solar panel arrays with separate battery banks. Both systems are using a C-band VSAT system for telemetry.

To minimize the GPS system power requirements, a low-power (DC) PC-104 computer with a solid-state hard drive, running LINUX, is used for real-time GPS data streaming and data collection. The initial local data storage (hard drive) was very small, with a 256 Mb storage capacity. A new PC-104 system with a 1 Gb solid-state hard drive, running an upgraded version of LINUX was installed in May of 2004. During this site visit, the VSAT system was brought back on-line after an extended outage and the GPS system and power configuration was inspected. Three years after the initial deployment, the station was in good condition. Minor repairs and preventive work was performed. A second PC-104 (with the 256 Mb hard drive) was left on-site as a spare unit. Plans are underway for an upgrade of the existing PC-104 with a newer generation compact computer design. The site is now online producing real-time GPS data back to NASA/JPL.