seismo-relay/docs/offset_investigation.md

The "offset" fault — investigation journal

⚠ CORRECTED 2026-08-28 (same day) — the v1 detector was wrong

Brian pushed back on the finding that offsets "come and go": in the field, once a unit develops one it stays broken until the geophone is replaced. He was right, and the challenge exposed two real flaws in the v1 detector:

1. It scored only the axis with the largest peak. A real event on one axis hid a persistent pedestal on another. BE12599 on 2026-08-21 read "clean" solely because Long had a 1.065 in/s event — Tran was sitting at +0.4732 in/s at that moment and was never examined.
2. It used the MEAN, which a real transient perturbs. The median is the resting baseline — most samples sit at it, so a blast does not move it. Same event, Long channel: mean +0.0783 vs median -0.0050.

Both flaws manufactured false recoveries. The corrected detector (scratch/offset_scan2.py, per-channel median) shows the pedestal is persistent, exactly as the field experience says. See §2b and §3b.

Then Brian proposed a better detector still — measure the floor during the pre-trigger window, and require it to hold across pre/middle/end. That is now the detector of record (§2c). Final answer: 5 of 45 units (11%), stable across a 2x threshold range.

Sections below that were written against v1 are marked; v1 numbers are kept for the reasoning trail, not as current fact.

A running record of the offset hardware fault on Instantel Series III seismographs: a geophone channel whose trace sits displaced from zero rather than centred on it.

This is a journal, not a spec. Findings are dated, dead ends are kept with the reason they died, and every number says where it came from. When something here is superseded, strike it and say why rather than deleting it — the point is that a future session can tell what was actually established from what was merely believed at the time.

Companion material:

• scratch/offset_scan.py — the detector
• scratch/verify_against_ascii.py — decoder verification harness
• docs/instantel_protocol_reference.md — wire protocol, incl. the unimplemented SUB 0x0E this investigation now wants

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TL;DR (current state, 2026-08-28)

• It is real device data, not a decode bug. Settled early and confirmed against Blastware's own ASCII exports.
• Base rate: 5–6 of 45 units (11–13%) across the full DL2 archive, 2018–2026. This confirms the earlier 2-of-21 (9.5%) estimate from the much smaller Terra-View DB — survivorship bias from deleted events had not concealed a wave of cases.
• The fault is bimodal, not a drift continuum. A unit is either clean or grossly off. Loosening the amplitude threshold 11× adds no new units.
• The unit's own sensor check cannot see it. 102 offset events, zero sensor-check failures. Do not try to use it as a screen.
• Cause is still unsettled. Instantel's autozero fixes the minority of cases; the rest are hardware. We cannot yet tell which is which remotely.
• The histogram corpus (63,535 files, 9.7x the waveforms) is now scanned too — see §8b. It independently confirms BE18438 and BE9558 with a clean 2.5x separation, but detects only 2 of the 5 confirmed units, cannot attribute a channel, and resolves time to ~a month. A negative histogram result is not evidence of health — DC leakage into the interval peak varies 45x between units.
• offset_scan3.py has a label defect (§8b): its spread gate discards 18.8% of high-|pre| rows onto units currently counted as clean. Re-cut before quoting any precision number again.
• Best open lead: SUB 0x0E (channel sensor data, 8 channels × 10 bytes, unimplemented) may carry the very numbers Instantel says to check against 2027–2069. Untested.

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1. What the fault looks like

A healthy geophone trace is centred on zero. An offset channel is parked away from zero, so the channel mean approaches its own peak. In Blastware the signature is "parallel lines above or below the zero line" (Instantel's own wording).

Consequences observed in the field:

• The unit can self-trigger on its own offset when the displacement exceeds the geo trigger level, producing streams of junk events with no ground motion. Instantel has a separate FAQ for this symptom (13-0-22, "Unit triggers continuously without activity").
• Recorded PPV for that channel is meaningless while the fault persists.

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2. The detector

Implemented in scratch/offset_scan.py. Operates on raw BW binaries only — no DB, no sidecars.

for each series-3 waveform binary:
    decode -> per-channel ADC counts
    dominant axis = channel with the largest |peak|
    flag when   |mean| / peak  >  0.70
          and   |mean|         >= 0.90 x the unit's geo trigger level
episodes = per-serial runs of flagged events, split on a >12 h gap

Why each term:

term	purpose
|mean|/peak > 0.7	the discriminator. A DC-parked trace has mean ≈ peak.
|mean| >= 0.9 × trigger	amplitude floor — suppresses quiet traces where mean and peak are both tiny and the ratio is meaningless.
dominant axis only	the fault is per-channel; scoring all three dilutes it.
12 h episode gap	separates deployments/visits rather than counting events.

Trigger level comes from a paired _ASCII.TXT when one exists, else the per-serial median learned from that unit's ASCII files, else 0.2 in/s.

Known limitation. Event traces contain real ground motion, so this can only see offsets large enough to dominate the trace. A mild offset on a real blast is invisible. Instantel's A/D-mode check (§5) is the only thing that sees the mild end. Our base rate is therefore a gross-offset rate.

2b. Detector v2 — per-channel median (CURRENT)

scratch/offset_scan2.py. Supersedes the above.

for each series-3 waveform binary:
    for each geo channel independently:
        pedestal = median(samples)          # resting baseline, robust to blasts
        flag the CHANNEL when |pedestal| >= 0.025 in/s   (5 A/D counts)
a unit has a real fault when a channel is flagged on >=3 CONSECUTIVE events

Why median: a DC pedestal shifts every sample, so it moves the median. A real event moves only a minority of samples, so it does not. This removes the need for the m/p ratio guard entirely — that guard existed only to compensate for using the mean.

Why per-channel: the fault is on one geophone axis. Scoring only the dominant axis means any event with motion elsewhere hides it.

Why "3 consecutive": the 0.025 in/s floor is only ~2x a healthy channel's resting median (observed 0.010-0.015), so isolated flags are noise. Persistence is the discriminator — and it is what the field experience predicts.

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3b. Archive results, corrected (v2)

	v1 (dominant axis, mean)	v2 (per-channel median)
units with any flagged event	6 of 45	19 of 45
units with a sustained pedestal (>=3 consecutive)	—	8 of 45 (18%)
runs of >=3 consecutive	—	29
runs of 1-2 events (noise)	—	69

Units with a sustained pedestal: BE9558, BA10895, BE11007, BE11529, BE12599, BE13117, BE18003, BE18438. BA10895 and BE18003 were invisible to v1.

The affected channel is most often Vert, which v1 got wrong — it named whichever axis had the largest peak. BE13117 and BE18438 are both Vert faults.

Longest / clearest runs:

unit	ch	span	events	median in/s
BE13117	Vert	2023-05-03 → 05-04	194	0.035 → 1.915
BE18438	Vert	2026-02-25 → 02-26	75	0.180 → 0.370
BE9558	Vert	2020-02-11 (6 h)	33	0.065 → 0.090
BE12599	Tran	2026-08-14 → 08-23	8	0.030 → 0.565
BE18003	Vert	2021-03-17 → 06-11	3	0.040 → 0.060

BE12599 began 2026-08-14, not 08-17 as v1 reported, and was still faulting at the last event in the archive.

2c. Detector v3 — PRE-TRIGGER floor + constant-floor test (CURRENT)

scratch/offset_scan3.py. Brian's method, and better than v2 for a reason worth naming: the pre-trigger window is definitionally quiet — it is the buffer captured before the trigger fired — whereas a whole-record median is merely robust to the event. pretrig_samples comes from the STRT record.

per channel:
    pre    = median of the first pretrig_samples samples
    mid    = median of the middle third
    end    = median of the final third
    spread = max(pre,mid,end) - min(pre,mid,end)

    offset when  |pre| >= floor  AND  spread <= 0.02 in/s
real fault when a channel is flagged on >=3 CONSECUTIVE events

A DC offset is a constant floor — present before the trigger, during, and after. The spread test rejects transients (settling, handling, a long event tail) that move one segment relative to the others, which is what v2's whole-record median could not do.

The empirical noise floor justifies the threshold. Across 19,244 non-flagged channel-events the pre-trigger floor distributes as:

floor	share
−1 unit (−0.005)	18.4%
0.000	62.7%
+1 unit (+0.005)	13.4%

94.5% within ±1 quantisation unit; median exactly +0.0000, mean −0.0008. So there is no systematic zero-point bias in the decoder — an independent confirmation of the 32000-count scale. A healthy channel really does read 0.000, and "any constant floor that is not 0.000" is the right signal, with ±1 unit of slack for quantisation.

The result is threshold-insensitive, which is what distinguishes a real signal from a tuned one:

floor	units flagged	sustained units
2 units (0.010)	34	15 ← into the noise
3 units (0.015)	26	8
4 units (0.020)	17	5
5 units (0.025) — Instantel's	12	5
8 units (0.040)	8	5

FINAL RESULT: 5 of 45 units (11%)

BE9558, BE11529, BE12599, BE13117, BE18438.

Unchanged across a 2x threshold range. BE11007 and BA10895 drop out — the spread test identifies them as transients, not pedestals.

The 11% headline happens to match v1's, but the reasoning and the unit list differ: v1 included BE11007 and named the wrong channel on most units.

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3. Archive results (2026-08-28)

Source: DL2 event export, 6,577 unique series-3 waveforms, 45 units. See dl2-archive for the Sent/ mirror trap.

283 suspect events, 15 episodes, 6 of 45 units (13.3%). Excluding BE11007 (§4, likely not an offset at all): 5 of 45 = 11.1%.

Threshold sensitivity — the bimodality result

Re-scoring the same corpus at a range of amplitude floors, with two ratio cut-offs (1 A/D count = 0.005 in/s, see §5):

|offset| floor	m/p > 0.7	m/p > 0.9
5 cts (0.025 in/s) — Instantel's own	333 ev / 6 units	279 ev / 5 units
10 cts (0.050)	294 / 6	274 / 5
20 cts (0.100)	250 / 5	244 / 4
40 cts (0.200)	209 / 5	203 / 4
80 cts (0.400)	152 / 4	148 / 2
160 cts (0.800)	144 / 2	141 / 1

Relaxing the floor by 11× (0.27 → 0.025 in/s) adds ~14% more events and no new units. There is no population of mild offsets hiding below our threshold in event data. Either a unit is clean or it is grossly off.

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4. Per-unit case files

Ordered by severity. m/p medians are on the offending channel.

BE13117 — one violent day, never again

145 / 454 events (32%), 1 episode, 2023-05-04, 6.8 h. Offset climbed 0.393 → 1.875 in/s within the episode. m/p median 0.996 — the trace is almost pure DC. No recurrence in the rest of its 454 events. No ASCII files in the archive, so no calibration history.

BE18438 — recurring, months apart

87 / 293 (30%), 2 episodes: 2025-11-15 (1.2 h, n=12, 0.279 → 0.369) and 2026-02-25 (28.8 h, n=75, 0.183 → 0.366). m/p median 0.967. Clean across all 196 events preceding its 2025-08-12 calibration.

BE9558 — six years apart

38 / 196 (19%), 4 episodes: 2020-02-11 (6.3 h, n=33, but only 0.068 → 0.086 — very mild), then 2026-04-14, 2026-04-29, 2026-05-04 (0.28–0.45). m/p median 0.919. Calibrated 2026-06-26; 0/7 events flagged after, but n=7 is far too small to call it fixed.

BE12599 — the live case ⚠

6 / 77 (8%), 6 single-event episodes, one per day at exactly 05:00, 2026-08-17 → 2026-08-23. Offset rose 0.383 → 0.565 then fell back to 0.345. m/p ≈ 0.965, geo trigger 0.3 in/s — the offset exceeds the trigger level, so the unit is triggering on its own fault. Last calibrated 2025-08-12.

This is the most recent and the most useful: a currently-faulting unit is the natural experiment for the re-zero-vs-repair question (§7).

BE11529 — marginal

4 / 99 (4%), 1 episode 2025-07-08, 0.4 h, offsets only 0.051 → 0.058 in/s. m/p median 0.959, so DC-dominated, but the magnitude is near the noise of this method. Treat as unconfirmed.

BE11007 — probably NOT an offset

3 / 70 (4%), 1 episode 2022-01-17, offsets 5.500 → 6.904 in/s — by far the largest. But m/p is only 0.719–0.738 against ≥0.9 for every other unit, and the peaks are 7.6–9.4 in/s on a 10 in/s range. That reads as a large real blast with asymmetric ground motion, not a parked trace. Excluded from the headline base rate.

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5. Instantel's own procedure and thresholds

From two Instantel technical-support FAQs supplied 2026-08-28 (answers 13-0-21 "How to determine offsets" and 12-0-10 "Removing offsets on an Instantel Series III monitor"; created 2008/2007, last updated 2009-03-06).

Identifying (13-0-21)

1. Create or use an event with the manual minimum trigger set for the connected geophone and microphone — i.e. an event that recorded no real data.
2. Save it and open in Blastware.
3. An offset shows as parallel lines above or below the zero line.
4. Put the unit in A/D mode — on Series III, press and hold OPTION, then press START MONITOR.
5. Display counts higher than 5, with no vibration or overpressure present, indicate an offset.

Removing — the autozero (12-0-10)

1. Be in a quiet area with low vibration.
2. Power on the Blastmate III / Minimate Plus.
3. Connect the geophone and microphone — LINEAR mic only. ⚠ Do not connect an "A" weight microphone, regardless of what the monitor displays.
4. Press Test.
5. Wait for the Sensor Check results to appear.
6. Press OPTION and START MONITOR simultaneously.
7. Performing Autozero appears; press Enter.
8. Confirm the sensors are properly connected; press Enter.
9. Wait for the autozero to complete.
10. Press Enter twice → Main Menu, Ready To Monitor, offset corrected.

The go/no-go number — 2027 to 2069

When you perform an Autozero on any Series III unit, the lists of numbers in the X1 and X8 gains should all be between 2027 and 2069. If not, repeat the Autozero. If the numbers are extremely out of the specified range, then the unit should be sent in for repair.

If this process does not remove the offset problem, return the unit and sensors to Instantel for repair.

This is the documented explanation for the field experience (Brian's dad, 2026-08-28) that a re-zero works maybe 10% of the time — the autozero only recovers units whose zero reference is still near-correct.

Scale derivation (inference, well-supported — not proven)

2048 is 12-bit midscale. Our codec's geo full scale is 32000 internal counts = 10 in/s, with 1 decoder unit = 16 counts = exactly 0.005 in/s (geo-full-scale-is-32000-counts). ±2000 A/D counts about 2048 therefore maps to ±10 in/s at 0.005 in/s per A/D count. That makes:

• Instantel's ">5 counts" threshold ≈ 0.025 in/s
• the 2027–2069 window = ±21 counts = ±0.105 in/s of tolerated zero error

Consistent and mutually corroborating, but we have not confirmed the A/D-count scale directly from a device reading.

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6. Ruled out — keep these dead

Condensation / humidity — DEAD (2026-08-25)

Proposed, then killed by its own controls: BE18438 stayed flat across a 10-hour overnight gap, and only 2 of 21 units showed the fault while 19 sat in the same weather. The apparent "diurnal cycle" was an artifact of binning by hour-of-day across two days. See waveform-dc-offset-is-real-device-data.

Clipping as a false-positive source — RULED OUT (2026-08-28)

A rail-hitting trace would fake an offset (mean → peak). It isn't happening: median suspect peak is only 10% of full scale, p90 is 18.6%. Only BE11007's 3 events exceed 50% FS, and none reach 98%.

The sensor check as a predictor — DOES NOT WORK (2026-08-28)

Tested on 102 offset events across 4 units:

unit	state	n	failed	median ratio	median freq
BE11529	offset	4	0	3.90	7.6
BE11529	clean	14	0	3.80	7.5
BE12599	offset	6	0	4.00	7.4
BE12599	clean	13	0	4.00	7.6
BE18438	offset	87	0	3.70	7.6
BE18438	clean	25	0	3.80	7.5
BE9558	offset	5	0	3.90	7.8
BE9558	clean	44	0	3.80	7.5

Zero failures on either side and indistinguishable ratios/frequencies. The swing test measures geophone frequency response and damping — it never examines DC zero. A grossly offset unit passes its own self-check. This is why the fault goes unnoticed until somebody looks at waveforms.

"Offsets are transient / come and go on their own" — RETRACTED 2026-08-28

v1 reported episodes lasting hours that ended spontaneously. This was an artifact of the v1 detector (see the banner at the top). With the per-channel median, the pedestal persists. Every clear case reads clean again only after a multi-day-to-multi-month gap consistent with service: BE13117 6 days, BE18438 24 days, BE9558 63 days with a confirmed Instantel calibration inside the gap. BE12599 never reads clean — it is still faulting at the end of the archive. This matches the operational experience: once a unit develops an offset it stays broken until the geophone is replaced.

"Offsets develop N months after calibration" — CONFOUNDED, NOT A FINDING

Tempting, and it looked strong:

unit	suspect before latest cal	after
BE18438	0 / 196	87 / 97
BE12599	0 / 62	6 / 15
BE11529	0 / 82	4 / 17
BE9558	38 / 189	0 / 7

But bucketing suspects by months-since-calibration gives one unit per bucket: 0–3mo={BE11529}, 3–6 & 6–9mo={BE18438}, 9–12mo={BE9558}, 12–15mo={BE12599}. The apparent "51% failure rate at 6–9 months" is entirely BE18438's single February 2026 episode. Five units with roughly one episode each cannot support a population trend. Do not re-derive this.

Also note: all affected units are calibrated on a ~12–13 month cadence, so "sent to Instantel" is the routine annual schedule, not evidence of a fault-driven return.

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7. Open questions

Q1 — Is it a latched bad zero or analog degradation?

The question that decides everything. A latched zero is correctable (possibly over the wire); degradation means a repair. Instantel's 2027–2069 rule implies both populations exist, with the split roughly 10/90 in the field.

BE12599 is the natural experiment — faulting as of 2026-08-23. Read its values, run the autozero, read them again.

Q2 — Can we read the autozero numbers over the wire? (best lead)

Instantel says to check "the lists of numbers in the X1 and X8 gains" — 4 sensors × 2 gains = 8 channels. The protocol reference already documents an unimplemented command with exactly that shape:

SUB 0x0E  ->  RSP 0xF1     "channel sensor data"
  2-step read; channel selector in params[6:8] = 0x0000..0x0007
  data length 0x0A (10 bytes) per channel

Blastware's Unit Channel Test sequence: POLL×N → 0x15 → 0x01 → 0x08 → 0x01 → 0x0E×8 → 0x98×2 → 0x0E×8 — note the second 0x0E pass carries live ADC readings.

Hypothesis (untested): 0x0E returns the numbers Instantel wants compared against 2027–2069. If true, SFM could diagnose an offset remotely and predict whether a re-zero will succeed — converting a 10%/90% shipping gamble into a decision made before packing a box.

How to test. bridges/ach_mitm.py is a generic TCP proxy:

python bridges/ach_mitm.py --bw-host <MODEM_IP> --bw-port 9034 --listen-port 9999

Point Blastware at the proxy and run Unit Channel Test. ⚠ In this topology the output filenames are reversed — the tool labels the connecting side "unit", so raw_s3_*.bin holds Blastware's bytes and raw_bw_*.bin the unit's.

Capture priority: (1) BE12599 while faulting, (2) a known-good unit as control, (3) before/after an autozero on the same unit. Eight 10-byte payloads with an expected value near 2048 is a very constrained puzzle.

Q3 — What is the mild-offset rate?

Unmeasurable from event files (§2). Only the A/D-mode check sees it. Would need a fleet sweep in A/D mode, or Q2 to succeed.

Q4 — Does an offset recur on the same unit after service?

BE9558 shows episodes in 2020 and 2026; BE18438 twice in four months. Suggestive of recurrence, but service records aren't in the data — only calibration dates.

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8. Data and tooling

what	where
detector	scratch/offset_scan.py
current results	/home/serversdown/dl2-archive/offset_archive.csv
earlier candidate list (Terra-View DB, 274 events)	scratch/offset_candidates.csv
archive working copy	/home/serversdown/dl2-archive/files/
archive source	NAS DeathStar 10.0.0.2, /volume1/Uploads/TMI/DL2-Event-backup-8-25-26/Event/autocall home/

⚠ The DL2 export keeps a byte-identical Sent/ mirror of its root. 13,077 waveform paths are 6,577 distinct files. Always dedupe by basename — this doubled two reported figures before it was caught.

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8b. The histogram corpus — the other 90% of the archive (2026-09-04)

Every result above §8 comes from waveform files. offset_scan3.py filters on \.[A-Za-z0-9]{2}0[Ww]$, so the corpus it scanned is 6,577 unique binaries. The archive also holds 63,535 unique histograms — 9.7x more files — which the pre-trigger method cannot touch, because a histogram carries no samples: only a per-interval, per-channel peak and half-period.

scratch/offset_hist_scan.py scans them. 63,505 of 63,535 decoded (99.95%), 43 units, 77.9M intervals. Two of the 45 units have no histograms at all. Output: /home/serversdown/dl2-archive/offset_hist.csv (190,515 channel-rows).

The premise, and how far it actually holds

A histogram file is hours of continuous monitoring, so most of its intervals are definitionally quiet, and a channel parked off zero cannot report a peak below its own displacement. The signal is real — two within-unit contrasts, siblings unmoved in both:

unit	channel	in-episode floor	outside	waveform |pre| same window
BE18438	Vert	0.0350	0.0050	+0.18 .. +0.37
BE12599	Tran	0.0250	0.0050	+0.03 .. +0.49

But the leakage from a waveform pedestal into the histogram floor is bimodal, not merely partial: measured ratio ~0.9 on BE18438 Vert, ~0.7 on BE9558, ~0.02 on BE12599 — two orders of magnitude on one instrument. The device evidently measures each interval peak against a running baseline, and how much DC survives that varies per unit. Consequence: a negative histogram result carries almost no information. Do not read "clean in the histograms" as clean.

The detector that survived

dmin(file, ch) = min[ch] - min over the other two geo channels, SAME file
gates (both hard):  n_intervals >= 60   AND   mic_p5 <= 5 raw counts
day statistic:      median of dmin over that day's qualifying files
flag day at        dmin >= 0.020 in/s (4 A/D counts)
episode at         >= 3 CONSECUTIVE observed days

Result: BE18438|Vert, BE9558|Tran, BE9558|Long. Threshold-insensitive — the journal's own test for a real signal against a tuned one — and this is the first operating point in the investigation that passes it cleanly. The identical answer holds across: statistic min or p5; length gate 10/30/60/120/300; mic gate 3/5/8/10; threshold 0.015–0.035 (a 2.3x span); persistence K = 2,3,4,5,7.

Separation, ranked by highest floor sustained over 3 consecutive gated days across all 135 unit-channels:

unit-channel	best3
BE18438 Vert	0.1650
BE9558 Long	0.0350
BE9558 Tran	0.0250
(2.5x gap)
BE7145 Tran	0.0100
entire rest of fleet	<= 0.0050 (one quantisation count)

Day-level false alarm: 37 of 99,432 gated unit-channel-days = 0.037%.

What it does NOT do — read this before trusting it

• It finds 2 of the 5 confirmed units, not 5. The site-quiet gate is what makes it work and it is also what costs BE11529 and BE12599. BE11529's four-day single-axis ramp (Tran 0.025 -> 0.055, both siblings pinned at 0.005) is the most offset-shaped thing in the corpus outside the two detections, and the gate discards it.
• The positive class is two units. Every threshold here is fitted to BE18438 and BE9558, which contribute 22 of the 37 flagged days in the entire corpus. No cross-validation is possible at n=2.
• Per-channel attribution is NOT established. Rotating the three geo channel labels within each file — preserving every value, file and day, destroying only channel identity — reproduces the episode count with p = 0.769 and the label agreement at p = 0.038–0.077. Report a unit and a window; do not name a geophone axis on the strength of this detector alone.
• Timing resolution is ~1 month, not ~1 day. A 30-day label shift still scores 2 of 9 episode hits; the signal dies only past ~60 days. The day-level series look far crisper than they are.
• Ground truth here is a sibling detector, not a service record. Agreement between the two corpora is corroboration of a shared method. Nothing in this section has been checked against an actual repair, calibration or RMA.

Dead ends — keep these dead

• Absolute floor (min / p1 / p5 / p10 / p25, thresholded alone) — RETIRED. Not fleet-comparable and mostly not about the channel. Scoring each cell using only the other two channels — a statistic containing zero information about the suspect channel — reaches AUC 0.746 against the same labels, versus 0.872 for the absolute floor itself. 66% of its apparent discrimination is "that day was noisy at that site." Interval size alone moves its p99 7x (0.0350 at 1 min vs 0.0050 at 2 s). And of all files with any channel above 0.025, 56.5% have all three channels above it — common-mode, i.e. the wrong physics.
• Zero-fraction — STRUCTURALLY IMPOSSIBLE, not merely weak. The device never reports a zero histogram interval peak. The value is a max over hundreds of samples of a channel that always carries at least 1 count of noise, so it is clamped at 1 A/D count (0.005 in/s). There is no zero to count.
• Interval size, sample rate, geo range, firmware — refuted as confounds for the differential. All four are file-level scalars: they move all three geo channels together, so they cannot produce a single-channel lift and the within-file differential is immune to them by construction. Geo range is identical across the three geo channels in 63,535 of 63,535 binaries. (Interval size remains fatal to the absolute-floor version, above.)

Two findings that are independent of the histogram detector

1. offset_scan3.py's spread <= 0.02 gate is discarding real signal. It rejects 113 of the 600 channel-rows with |pre| >= 0.025 (18.8%), and the rejections are not random — 92 of them fall across 41 unit-channels currently labelled NEGATIVE. Four would become sustained positives under an amplitude-only >=3-consecutive rule: BE12599|Long (run of 8), BE18003|Vert (4), BA10895|Vert (3), BE12844|Tran (3). Until this is re-cut, the fleet label is three-state — POSITIVE / NEGATIVE / SPREAD-REJECTED(unknown) — and the third state should be excluded from both TP and FP counts rather than silently scored as healthy. Every precision figure computed against the two-state label, in this section and in §3, is affected.

2. The waveform corpus sees ~7% of the days a unit was deployed. 2,627 (unit, day) observations against the histogram corpus's 35,105 — 13.4x — with a per-unit median ratio of 0.070. BE12599, a confirmed unit, is waveform-observed on 39 of its 1,666 histogram-observed days (2.3%). Any statement of the form "the fault was absent before date X" that rests on waveform coverage alone is much weaker than its event count suggests.

BA10895 — reclassified (see also §4)

Previously dismissed as a transient. The histogram record shows its Vert quiet-minute floor at 0.005 on 62/62 qualifying files from 2023-07-07, then 0.010–0.015 on 48/58 files from 2023-08-03 to 08-27, while Tran moves on 2/58 and Long on 9/58 and the site mic floor never leaves 1–3 counts. Independently, 42 of its 85 waveform events (49.4%) are single-axis-dominant — one geo peak

= 10x both siblings and >= 0.05 in/s — the highest rate in the 45-unit fleet (BE13117 36.1%, BE18438 29.4%), and 100% of it on Vert. Vert excursions of 0.1–1.5 in/s with Tran/Long at 0.005–0.035 are not ground motion.

This is a genuine Vert-channel hardware fault, but not the classic pedestal — the differential is only one A/D count. Caveat: its entire histogram record is a single 52-day deployment ending 2023-08-27, so nothing says whether it persisted, was serviced, or resolved.

The other six marginal units — BE11007, BE17354, BE18004, BE18104, BE9557, BE18003 — are clean. All seven cap at +0.005 to +0.007 (one A/D count) lifetime under the quiet-site gate, against +0.175 for BE18438 Vert and +0.062 for BE9558 Long. Three individual waveform flags fall in windows with zero histogram coverage and are NO-DATA, not clean: BE18004|Tran 2024-10-16, BE9557|Tran 2021-06-28, BE9557|Vert 2025-06-12.

Still open in this section

• The 11 thin-coverage units were not screened (BE10202, BE11462, BE13779, BE15760, BA15957, BE16754, BE16758, BE8081, BE8626, BA9229, BE9887 — each under 20 waveform events, several with hundreds of histograms). This is the population most likely to hold a previously unknown offset, and it is the one slice of the plan that did not run. BE11462 was incidentally scored clean by the full-archive pass; BE10202 has no histogram files at all.
• No completeness audit was run over the above.
• Re-cutting the ground truth three-state (finding 1) and re-scoring everything against it.

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⚠ Serial prefixes — four of these units are BlastMates, not MiniMates

Corrected 2026-09-06, after Brian queried "BA10895?" against a report that said BE10895. He was right. The BW filename encodes the serial number only — L895 -> 10895 — and every offset scanner synthesised the family prefix as "BE". Four of the 43 archive units are BA (BlastMate, the MiniMate Plus's bigger sibling; same Series III, byte-identical data):

BA9229, BA10060, BA10895, BA15957.

Read off the file bodies, which carry the serial verbatim. No analysis changed — grouping was always on the numeric part, and no unit number maps to two serials — but every earlier reference to "BE10895" and the other three is a label error and has been corrected throughout this document.

The same assumption was live in two production sites and is fixed (sfm/waveform_store.py, minimateplus/client.py): the store would have filed a BlastMate under a unit that does not exist, and the monitor-log decoder lost the geo threshold along with the serial. See commit 9ceff65.

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9. Chronology

date	event
2026-08-25	Reported as a waveform decode bug — traces with a DC offset. Investigation shows the offset is real device data; the decoder is correct.
2026-08-25	Brian relays his dad's description: a known hardware fault called an "offset"; usually sent to Instantel.
2026-08-25	First detection pass over the Terra-View DB: 2 of 21 units, 274 events, 11 months. Flagged as vulnerable to survivorship bias — flooded events were routinely deleted.
2026-08-25	Condensation hypothesis proposed, then killed by its own controls.
2026-08-25	Parked pending the multi-year archive.
2026-08-28	DL2 archive pulled (33 GB, 546k files; 6.6 GB working set).
2026-08-28	Archive scan: 6 of 45 units, 283 events, 15 episodes. Prior base rate confirmed, not overturned.
2026-08-28	Clipping ruled out; m/p established as the discriminator; BE11007 reclassified as probably a real blast.
2026-08-28	Calibration-timing correlation attempted and rejected as confounded.
2026-08-28	Instantel FAQs supplied: autozero procedure, the 2027–2069 window, the >5 counts threshold. Explains the ~10% re-zero success rate.
2026-08-28	Bimodality established; sensor check proven blind to offsets; SUB 0x0E identified as the best open lead.
2026-08-28	v1 detector retracted. Brian challenged the "come and go" finding against field experience. Two flaws found: dominant-axis-only scoring and mean-instead-of-median. Corrected detector shows persistent pedestals on 8 of 45 units, and the gaps are service windows.
2026-08-28	Detector v3 (Brian's method): pre-trigger floor + pre/mid/end consistency. Healthy channels proven to sit at 0.000 +/-1 unit (94.5%), confirming no decoder zero-point bias. Final: 5 of 45 units (11%), threshold-insensitive.
2026-09-04	Histogram corpus scanned — 63,505 of 63,535 files, 43 units, 77.9M intervals (9.7x the waveform corpus). scratch/offset_hist_scan.py.
2026-09-04	Absolute-floor statistic retired: 66% of its discrimination is a day/site confound (other-channels-only AUC 0.746 vs 0.872). Zero-fraction shown structurally impossible — the device clamps every interval peak at >= 1 count.
2026-09-04	Site-quiet-gated cross-channel differential established: BE18438 Vert, BE9558 Tran+Long, threshold-insensitive over a 2.3x span. Finds only 2 of the 5 confirmed units — leakage into the histogram floor is bimodal (0.9 to 0.02), so a negative result carries almost no information. Per-channel attribution not established (channel-scramble p = 0.769).
2026-09-04	BA10895 reclassified from transient to a genuine Vert fault of a different subtype — 49.4% single-axis-dominant events, the highest in the fleet, 100% on Vert. The other six marginal units are clean.
2026-09-04	Defect found in offset_scan3.py: its spread <= 0.02 gate discards 18.8% of rows with |pre| >= 0.025, concentrated on 41 negative unit-channels; 4 would be sustained positives without it. The fleet label is three-state, not two.
2026-09-06	Four units relabelled BA, not BE — BA9229, BA10060, BA10895, BA15957 are BlastMates. The BW filename carries only the serial number; the family prefix must be read from the file body. Fixed in the scanners and in two production sites.