GBT Operations and Commissioning Meeting 19 March 2004 AGENDA 1. Az Track and Telescope Status -- Bob 2. Observing News -- Ron 3. Scheduling Status -- Carl 4. Frontends, IFs, and Spectral Baselines -- Roger 5. Spectrometer Status -- Rich 6. Software Status -- Nicole 7. Project Planning Status -- John 8. Any other Business PRELIMINARY REPORTS 1. Az Track and Telescope Status Az track * We replaced plate 42 this week. The effort went very smoothly - within a normal business day. Great team effort by machinists and the telescope mechanics. * SGH is still working on results. May be Monday. Telescope * We will be replacing the elevation motor today (Friday). Tim is taking it to Pittsburgh for analysis. -- RAA 2. Observing News Over the last week we had 16 observing sessions for 8 different projects and 1 session of Q-band proposal checkouts. Only one significant proposal still requires a Q-band checkout. Lost time this week (5%) is one of the lowest I've recorded. Only 1 hour was lost directly to the weather (winds), although one observer was unlucky in the day she chose to observe at high frequencies. Main problems this week were: Spectrometer (60 min); Grail, GFM (60 min); GO, IARDS (60 min); and a problem changing M&C version (60 min). One project lost about an hour trying to fight the well-reported problem with I.F. power levels when observing with widely-spaced band passes. Following this, Roger and a few of the support scientist went over ways to get around this problem in the future. Carl, Phil, and the support scientist met on Wednesday and decided to implement a new way of scheduling our support and on-call time. The main points of the new system are: o Instead of assigning particular projects to a support scientist, we will now be assigned blocks of time during which we will support all projects that are run during those blocks. o A week is divided into four blocks: Daytime, Tues through Friday; Nighttime, Tues through Friday; Daytime, Saturday through Monday; and Nighttime, Saturday though Monday. o Occasionally, there will be exceptions to this plan for specialized observing (e.g., VLBI, SPIGOT) or until each of us can support all types of observing. o Each of us will still be available to help out on critical issues but for non-critical issues staff should first try to get help from the person who is assigned to be on-call. o The new 'block' scheduling starts in April and our assignments are available on the Wiki. -- RJM 3. Scheduling Status Last Week ========= Observations for proposals GBT04A-030, GBT02C-030, GBT03C-031, GBT03B-011, GBT04A-026, GBT02C-012, GBT02C-002, GBT03B-019 Next Week ========= Observations scheduled for BS131 PI Zhi-quiang Shen VLBA Observations of Sgr A ? at 3 and 7 mm GBT02A-063 [P] PI Mark Claussen Water Maser Monitoring of Low and Intermediate Mass Young Stellar Objects BB178 PI Geoffrey Bower Trigonometric Parallax of Radio Stars in the Pleiades GBT04A-045 [B] PI Mallory Roberts Timing of Three Binary Pulsars Discovered in a Survey of Mid-Latitude EGRET Error Boxes GBT02C-052 [P] PI Robin McGary Ammonia in the Central 10 pc of the Galaxy GBT04A-025 [B] PI Harvey Liszt Physical Properties of Halo HI Clouds GBT02A-046 [P] PI James Braatz Monitoring a Maser Disk in Mrk 1419 GBT04A-026 [B] PI Yurii Pidopryhora Mapping the Galactic Halo HI: Correlated halo clouds and an HI plume GBT04A-016 [B] PI Jennifer Donovan Deep Searches for Young Pulsars in ``Shell'' Supernova Remnants GBT02C-012 [P] PI Mike Hollis A Search for the First Nucleic Acid Base Biomarker: Interstellar Pyrimidine GBT03B-015 PI Scott Ransom Timing the Pulsars in the Globular Cluster M30 GBT03A-016 PI Ingrid Stairs The Physics of a Massive Pulsar System GBT03B-019 [B] PI Di Li The GBT HI Narrow Self Absorption Survey of Star Forming Regions March ===== Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 456 [126] Maintenance ~ 55 [49] Tests & Comm ~ 226 [21] Shutdown ~ 4 Un-assigned ~ 5 April ===== Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 479 [192] Maintenance ~ [157] Tests & Comm ~ 204 [38] Un-assigned ~ 38 May === Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 226 [38] Maintenance ~ 88 [61] Tests & Comm ~ 120 [63] Un-assigned ~ 311 Proposal Checkouts ================== Awaiting checkout - 0 Active checkout - 24 On Hold - 7 Schedule - 46 Completed - 152 Current backlog [hours] = 2427 -- RCB 4. Frontends, IFs, and Spectral Baselines 5. Spectrometer Status *****Status***** The spectrometer operated fairly reliably this week. Just a few of the usual hiccups. The spigot cards were all upgraded to the latest version of Xilinx personality and tested in the system. The test procedure for the pulsar spigot was completed and tested. John and Holly are reviewing it. By comparing logs and Dana's report, John discovered that Data Interrupt Failures happen in scans where "duplicate start" commands occur. No progress on the Sample Distributor Card firmware. *****Development***** LTA board development continues. Cross-correlation test fixture design continues. The printed circuit for the noise sources is nearly complete. All components have been received. *****Plans for next week***** Continue above development. -- Rich & Holly 6. Software Status Single Dish Development IPT #74 - Friday, March 19, 2004 Today ends week 5 of 6 in development cycle C2 in 2004. The Plan of Record is available from the wiki at Software.PlanOfRecordC22004. Release documentation from previous cycles can be found at Software.SoftwareReportCentral on the wiki; this will be added to over the upcoming week as testing for this cycle continues. Integration testing for M&Cv4.2 and Sparrow v4.2 commenced on Thursday, 3/18. Regression testing is scheduled for the middle of next week in preparation for product releases on Weds 3/31 PM. Ray and Joe tested the newly ported AnalogFilterRack and ConverterRack, all together under the control of one MCBServer, successfully for the first time during integration testing on Thursday. Several changes were made during this past week after tests on Fri 3/12 uncovered some critical issues. After the release of the new M&Cv4.2 on 3/31, gbteio1 and gbteio2 will be no more. Antenna position calculations were changed in the SDFITS generator to be more efficient, and Bob Garwood amended the new software to include the same performance enhancements to the Van Vleck code that were implemented in the gbtmsfiller. Several timing tests have been run, including the following: A) Bill Cotton's DCR Data (one project, ~1000 scans, ~300 integ each, including some pointing, some focus, and one substantial map) - In September 2003: 31 hours - In November 2003, running on a faster machine (thales): 23 hours, 30 min - In December 2003, on new RH9 operating system: 18 hours, 14 min - In March 2003, with improvements in software: 1 hour, 28 min B) Tom Bania's Dec 2003 Spectrometer Data - With previous version of software: 1 hour, 18 min - With improvements in software: 25 min Work has commenced on completing the header information so that the files will be useful. This week, Az and El were added, a separate location for storing RA & Dec was included, and updates to FEED and SRFEED are in progress. Work is following the requests on Data.SdfitsBetaRequests so thanks to everyone who contributed over the past few months. In other news, additional work was done in preparation for Ka band commissioning next month. Simulations using the receiver manager, Ka2Dcr (temporary circuit for testing) and MMConverter were completed this week. SDD operational support this week included: + Project Office Request #976 (revising the encoder reading portion of the Tipper Manager to support hardware changes) has been completed and will be tested during integration sessions this week. -- NMR 7. Project Planning Status March 15, 2004 Planning Meeting Minutes Rm 137 10:45 A.M. [0] Observer comments & operator log items to discuss Operator's log comments Significant failures this week stemmed from: Computing: Etamin -- hung and was rebooted. Virgo (antenna Controller) failed after power outage Software: GFM, Grail, LO1, Weather #3 display, IARDS/glishd, antenna manager Bugs have been found in Grail that would explain the Grail problems. Electronics: Spectrometer -- Bad data, Data Interrupt Failure Spectral Processor -- hung in aborting. Weather Station #2 Wind Speed indicator replaced C-band receiver left in Manual mode DCR not working with LO switching (HW or SW?) gbtaio3 communications failure after bouncing the power Friday PF1 support rack breaker tripped on inrush current. *** Action Item: John to get Gary to fix the temerature controllers *** so the breaker doesn't trip. Telescope/Servo: CCU -- IRIG card failed Observing Summaries Jeremy Darling, GBT03C-009 -- Moderately Successful Main problem was with RFI in UHF TV band See Web for full report Wendy Lane, AGBT01A-061, AGBT03A-015 -- Very Successful Servo problems were the main lost time item. Dormitory maintenance during the day caused lost sleep Cafeteria closed on Holiday weekend caused hunger. See Web for full report *** Action item: John to talk to butch about trying to schedule *** maintenance when it won't disturb observers. Phil will ask *** Becky to get and distribute Do Not Disturb signs to guests. Wendy Lane, GBT01A-058 -- Very successful RFI at high end of 450 MHz band bad Trying to observe a setting source gave problems Documentation for problem solving is lacking Food and Room very good See Web for full report Observing Report - 10/11 March Checkout for 2A66, K. O'Neil Problems Summary (detailed below): (1) Kband receiver LO power low (2) DCR 'dropouts' every 1-3 seconds (3) GFM stopped updating/reducing focus scans (without any warning!) and had to be re-started (4) GO didn't respect the proc.repeatnumber in the GO tables (5) GO froze after "slewto" command and had to be restarted (6) Dish doesn't appear to reduce the nod data correctly Observing Summary: Overall things went well. Thanks to the configuration api I was able to write (and test) my hardware set-up well before the observations, resulting in my being up and running within 5-10 minutes, including a receiver change(!). All other problems during the night were minor, although persistent enough that I couldn't trust just leaving the observations running and getting some sleep. Finally, I should mention that with the dynamic corrections running I did a peak & focus every hour, which seemed more than sufficient, which was great. Project: 2C12, S. Widicus, G. Blake Obs, Support: K. O'Neil Problems Summary (described below): (1) Grail needed a taskmaster restart (2) Iards lost communication with GO (3) Iards can't reduce nodding data (4) Configuration API set frequencies outside Converter Rack range (5) When frequencies were separated by more than 1GHz the spectrometer did not receive enough power to run (5) Clouds came in around sunrise, making pointing/focus difficult Observing Summary: Most problems encountered over the run were fairly minor, except our inability to observe more than a 1GHz spread in frequencies. The result of this failure (described below) was that the observers only managed to look at half the spectral lines of interest for their main source. Overall about 2 hours (total) were lost to problems. Project: 3B19, Di Li Obs. Support: K. O'Neil Problems Summary (described below): (1) The configuration API did not set the mode to frequency switching (2) Old glish process was running on titania, taking 90% of the CPU and eventually crashing GO_LITE (3) Iards didn't reduce the frequency switched data Observing Summary: Things went pretty well - the only failure that resulted in lost time was the old glish process. Fortunately Paul M. was in at work and able to kill the process fairly quickly, resulting in maybe 5-10 minutes lost, in total. Project 2C12, P. Jewell Problem Summary: (1) dcmon not working (2) GFM fault (3) Grail fault Observing Summary: This session for 2C-12 ran for 24 hours on Saturday, 13 Mar 2004, from midnight to midnight. Overall, this was a very smooth run -- the smoothest we have had over the past couple of weeks. [1] Resource calendar schedule conflicts and discussions Frank's need for 4 hrs with moving telescope is the only problem. After much discussion, it was decided to use 4 hours of the "general Test" time, and ask Frank if he could use the 2 hours of dead time between VLBI observations to check things out. [2] Observing Schedule discussions No activity due to meeting length [3] GBT development planning Planning meetings this week. [4] AOB -- JMF 8. Any other Business