GBT Operations & Commissioning Meeting 6 February 2004 AGENDA 1. Az Track and Telescope Status -- Bob 2. Observing News -- Ron 3. Holography Results -- Fred S., Ron 4. Frontends, IFs, and Spectral Baselines -- Roger 5. Spectrometer Status -- Rich 6. Software Status -- Amy 7. Scheduling Status -- Carl 8. Project Planning Status -- John 9. Any other Business PRELIMINARY REPORTS 1. Az Track and Telescope Status Az Track: * Finite element efforts continue at SG&H. The last run (of a wearplate over a modified joint) took 10 full days to run, but it did complete successfully. The model has to be tweaked and run again. The long run time was thought to be caused by the manner in which Windows XP manages SCSI drives. Changes have been made to reduce run time. Completion has slipped to at least the end of February. -- RAA 2. Observing News Over the last week we serviced about eight observing projects, three program checkouts, and a holography run for about ~150 hours of observing and tests. Bad weather was the cause of most of the lost time (9 hrs for precipitation; 12 hrs for low temperatures. We had network and HVAC problems that would have cost us two to three hours if they hadn't occurred during a weather shutdown. About 5 hours of program checkouts were either compromised or lost due to Spectrometer hardware problems. Next, we lost time due to software problems with the Spectral Processor (2 hrs) and Antenna (1 hr). Both the Spectral Processor and Spectrometer had a reasonable number of failures that lasted under 10 minutes each. GO's ephemeris software wasn't working and I believe the problem has already been patched. In total, lost time went to: Weather - 14% ; Hardware/Software - 6%. No one in the last week has complained about the 'bad' lag problems. Rich Lacasse guesses that reinserting various boards fixed the problem. Frank can discuss his program checkouts with the folks from Lincoln Labs. Fred and I can give a quick review of the promising results from the holography run from Wed. night. Glen has a Q-band commissioning memo that should be out soon. -- RJM 3. Holography Results 4. Frontends, IFs, and Spectral Baselines Baselines: With the Q-band receiver in the Equipment Room, we see similar baseline instabilities as were seen on the GBT. Since last Friday we have installed isolators at two of the cryogenic LNAs' input port, and found that there was no change in the receiver behavior. Since two receiver channels are much worse than the other two, we are now attempting to isolate the cause by interchanging components. This is a lengthy process because it requires warming and cooling the receiver, and waiting for access to the spectrometer and part of the IF system. Other: Work continues on upgrades to the LO Reference modules and the outdoor antenna range, and the feed defroster was connected on three more feeds. Support for checkout of proposal 3C001 has taken significant effort this week. -- RDN 2/5/2004 5. Spectrometer Status *****Operational Status***** The spectrometer suffered a failure on a memory board on Wednesday. Fortunately it was caught and fixed during some check-out time and resulted in no lost astronomy time. Wednesday afternoon was working on trouble shooting spikes in 800MHZ modes and big jump in 12.5 MHZ mods problems. With Glen's help, found out that a memory card in Quadrant 3 is bad. Replace it with the spare one, the problem is fixed. Fortunately it was caught and fixed during some check-out time and resulted in no lost astronomy time. Now we don't have any good spare memory cards. Both two spare memory cards are not working well. Currently, I temporary stooped LTA redesign project but working on fix bad spare memories cards. Not sure how long it will take, but will try to fix them as soon as possible. The spigot card is still broken. This week we have looked hard at the flash memory in which the xilinx personality is stored. It seems to be controlled and to operate according to specification. Ford has been helping by modifying the firmware to check the integrity of the download to the flash. *****Development work***** This week Holly spent one and half days working on FPGA simulating. Functional simulation is almost finished, will start time simulating soon when have time. *****Plans for next week***** Continue work on the broken spigot card Continue work on the broken memory cards Continue new LTA card development -- Rich, Holly, and John 6. Software Status Single Dish Development IPT #68 - Friday, February 5, 2004 Today ends week 5 of 6 in the current development cycle. The Plan of Record is available from the wiki at Software.PlanOfRecordC12004 along with the most up-to-date status information. Our first round of integration testing occurred yesterday. Results can be found on the wiki at Software.SoftwareReportCentral. Progress was made this week on porting the Converter Rack from VxWorks to Linux. Work on the port has slowed recently due to unanticipated changes/enhancements/additions that had to be made to Ygor libraries and heavy operational support in past weeks. Detailed status information on porting activities (including which Ygor libraries have been modified/enhanced) can be found on the wiki at Software.StatusMR4C903. Electronics will be installing the computer rack that will be used by the ported Converter Rack Manager and Analog Filter Rack Manager in the GBT Equipment Room at their earliest convenience. All PTCS items (not dropped via SDD-sponsor agreement from this cycle) are on schedule and we are addressing bugs in GFM as they are identified and reported. An MR generated from the prototype generic DCR plugin is written and sponsor approved; work on the production plugin has begun. The changes to the Active Surface Manager in support of Zernike polynomial coefficients are currently ready for internal SDD testing. Work on the Observing API beta has been completed for this cycle. The prioritized list of observing procedures listed on the wiki at Data.ObservingProcTestCases.Prototype served as the roadmap for this cycle's work. The implementation for all observing procedures has been 1) unit tested except for Slew, OffOnSameHA and PointMap, and 2) antenna-simulator tested except for Slew, OffOnSameHA, RALongMap and PointMap. On Thursday, February 5, Frank Ghigo (sponsor) was supplied with a copy of the observing procedures implemented in the prototype to date for review. We will be demonstrating our prototype observing procedures to Frank at his earliest convenience. Analysis is also underway for reengineering DISH, so that it can be used more interoperably. The analysis is expected to be complete by 2/15. -- AS 7. Scheduling Status Last Week ========= Observations for proposals GBT03B-030, GBT02A-063, GBT02A-031, GBT03C-031, GBT02C-065, GBT02C-054, GBT03B-013, GBT03C-012, GBT02A-046, GBT02A-069, GBT02B-016 Completed proposals GBT02C-065, GBT03C-012 Next Week ========= Observations scheduled for GBT02A-031 [B] PI Jay Lockman Galactic HI Mapping of X-Ray, UV, and Optical Deep Fields GBT03B-013 [B] PI Min Yun An Unbiased HI Survey of the Coma Cluster and Beyond GBT01A-058 [B] PI Frank Briggs High redshift Damped Lyman Alpha Systems against background Radio Galaxies GBT03B-027 [P] PI Harold Butner K-band Search for Quinoline and Isoquinoline GBT02B-016 [P] PI Philip Solomon Dense Molecular Gas and Star Formation in the High Redshift Universe (HCN) GBT02A-028 [B] PI James Braatz Exploring the Radio Spectrum of Orion A and W51 February ======== Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 397 [268] Maintenance ~ 18 [105] Tests & Comm ~ 280 [34] Un-assigned ~ 2 March ===== Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 471 [38] Maintenance ~ 2 [149] Tests & Comm ~ 172 [32] Un-assigned ~ 99 Proposal Checkouts ================== Awaiting checkout - 0 Active checkout - 41 On Hold - 7 Schedule - 36 Completed - 144 Current backlog [hours] = 2936 -- RCB 8. Project Planning Status February 2, 2004 Planning Meeting Minutes Rm 137 10:00 A.M. [0] Observer comments & operator log items to discuss Project AGBT02C (Langston report) No support for scripting a balance procedure Spectral baselines look good, 800 MHz RFI seems reasonable. Initial setup difficult. Spectrometer periodically requires reboots. 800 MHz cal values are still reversed; X <==> Y. Observer's report summary: Successes: I was able to complete the planned observations, observing was generally trouble-free, and the RFI environment was much better than expected. Detected a new HI absorption system, and, if one believes the \"cockroach\" theory, there are likely several more lurking in the data. Problems: (1) Could not use config_tool for setup, (2) spectrometer required a reboot when aborted during a scan, (3) spectrometer crashed in a serious way and was offline for 6 hours, (4) could not set up scripts to run multiple sources without forcing a scan abort (which required some data fixes by P. Margani), (5) had several wind events, (6) had many, many snow dumps, (7) lost 3 hours to sub-zero temperatures, (8) iards could not display my data without crashing. Having "prepare" in GO tables would allow a balancing script to be written in a more straightforward way than by putting illegal values into the spectrometer manager. We will discuss the reason for having to do the illegal value hack with Karen O'neil via email. The report of 800 MHz cal values being reversed needs a decision and final dispensation by Ron Maddalena and his crew of support scientists. Projects: AGBT02A_063_015 (Minter report) Problem summary: 1) Spectrometer/earth crashed 2) Spectrometer starting 1 second late 3) Spectrometer errors did not appear on operators message screen - data lost SDD has investigated this, and can find no cause. It was pointed out that if the spectrometer failed to run for the last hour, somebody should have noticed in the scan coordinator display that the spectrometer was not running. GBT Test Summary: CGSR2 == Caltech Green Bank Swinburne Recorder Tests were successful! Three known pulsars observed with the GBT. The CGSR2 could use a little more computing power to keep up with input data rates. Straight recording tests worked fine. We discussed the amount of support it took to get the system running. Phil will circulate to the planning committee the proposed "external instrumentation" policy. We should be sure to plan for support staff necessary to allow external user instrumentation to be brought up with a minimum of disruption. [1] Resource calendar schedule conflicts and discussions Do the Generator tests move the telescope? [2] Observing Schedule discussions Test time reallocation for W/O Feb 1st due to Q band removal Carl has reallocated all Q band time for later in the month. John pointed out that there is no estimated time for reinstallation. Carl will work out with Ron and Richard the test time for this week. [3] GBT development planning IF Manager rework Amy will have Mark Clark compile a list of bugs against the IF Manager, and a list of enhancements that need to be made. An estimate of the time involved will be submitted to the planning group for consideration for the next cycle. What receiver will be removed to make way for Ka band? A decision will be announced at the Friday meeting. John notes that this same problem, only worse, will come up next year when the Penn Array receiver shows up in the winter. [4] AOB The IF Manager changes needed for the LL experiment were missed. Amy asked that everyone look at proposed changes and help make sure that things like this don't get missed in the future. Richard asked that we think about revisiting the declaration that no more work is to go into go and iards, as these programs are heavily used. Jim Braatz has some requests that would save him much telescope time. It was proposed that Toney Minter and Jim could spend a few days fixing bugs and adding the things that Jim needs. A decision on this will be forthcoming. Richard also asked if Jim could merge his private IARDS version ito the released version. Amy will find out the impact of this. Richard set the deadline for requests for next cycle as Monday, February 9th. The meeting will be held Wednesday, February 11th. -- JF 9. Any other Business