Our journey began on Cornwallis Island, in Nunavut. The only town on this remote island is Resolute Bay, located roughly at 74 degrees north. Resolute is home to the Arctic headquarters of the Polar Continental Shelf Program (PCSP), which manages all Arctic research operations in Canada. We had initially planned to be in Resolute for only four days before heading to our next destination, the McGill Arctic Research Station (MARS) on Axel Heiberg island. The weather, however, had different plans for us: due to a combination of a flooded runway on Axel Heiberg, as well as relentless rain and fog, we were stuck in Resolute for 17 days. This was not a total waste of time, seeing as we did a lot of preliminary assembly in the PCSP warehouse, worked on the code for the back-end, and did some RFI surveying of Cornwallis island!

Finally, on a mildly foggy day, we boarded a Twin Otter and set off to Axel Heiberg Island. After some shennanigans involving landing on a very underused runway a couple kilometres from the main base and ferrying all our people and equipment via helicopter, we made it to MARS and set up camp on a windy ridge overlooking the glaciers.

After settling in, it was time to get to work on installing two ALBATROS antenna stations. Due to limited transportation options (the camp ATV was broken that summer), and after a charitable helicopter pilot helped us haul a lot of our things down the hill and across the lake (including a 200lb Pelican box and four 60L tanks of methanol), we had to settle for a 160m baseline. Although this won't let us do interferometry at the frequencies of interest, it'll be pretty essential as a stress-test of the system. It's the first time it'll be running through the Arctic winter!