Diagnostics and Repair

Are you having a bad day with your Mission Specialist system? You have come to the right place.

Solving problems requires either a methodical diagnostics approach, or lots of luck. If you don't like to gamble, the following may help you overcome challenges that inevitably present themselves from time to time.

Before providing the specific details of diagnosing and repairing the MSS?, some basic troubleshooting guidelines are in order. Following these practices should make your efforts much more efficient and successful.

• Suspect and check the obvious first - It's easy to get distracted and overlook something obvious.

• Recheck the obvious - Have someone verify your work. If you're helping someone, verify what you've been told. Sometimes, just talking through the details can help you realized you missed a step or fact.

• Understand correct operation and expected results - How should it work and what should happen? Does it?

• Learn and recognize symptoms - What are the results telling you? What are the most likely suspects and what can be ruled out?

• Isolate, Divide and Conquer - Classify the problem to sub-systems, remove what you can and substitute known working parts if possible. Or, try suspect parts with a known working system.

• One step at a time - Be logical and make each test provide results you can use to narrow down the problem.

The MSS is a collection of relatively simple components, but when something goes wrong, it's easy to get overwhelmed. The following steps should be your first response to a general system malfunction, especially if the power and communications warning indicators in the ROV Health instrument are lit.

1. Power down the system, check the connections and restart using the recommended procedures.

2. To identify whether the tether is a possible source of the problem, connect the ROV directly to the control panel to see if the symptoms persist.

3. Remove all attached accessories to eliminate the possibility that an accessory is the source of the problem.

If the problem is more isolated to a specific function, or these steps fail to resolve a general problem, it's time for a closer look at the symptoms and subsystems.