Notes from Commissioning Coordination Meeting
23 August 2002

1. Observing Program Checkout

All accepted proposals have now been classified into one of five states:

awaiting checkout - nothing has been done
active checkout   - being assessed for viability
on hold           - has been assessed and cannot currently be scheduled
schedule          - has been assessed and can be scheduled
complete          - proposal is discharged

Full details can be found from:

       http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbt/gbtstatus/propStages.html

and subsequent links. There are now 21 proposals in the active checkout 
queue. These comprise all 01A,2A and 2B proposals at frequencies lower
than K-band, plus a few of the more straightforward K-band proposals.
Once these proposals have been reviewed, we will start including 02C
proposals. We will attempt keep the "Checkout Notes" fields up to date
to keep track of the current status of each proposal in the active
checkout queue.

It does appear that many proposals required multiple IFs; this will
be moved up in aips++ priorities (the main remaining area is the
calibration routines).

RMP and Dave Hogg have been working on standard checkout of the Spectrometer
50MHz and 12.5MHz 9-level 2IF modes, according to the prescription in
Phil's checkout document.


2.  Frequency switching tests

It appears that Joe and Amy have found the causes of the sig/ref "flipping"
problem. 1700 scans were run overnight on Thursday with no flipped spectra.
These fixes will be included in the August M&C release. The first cycle
of the Spectral Processor will remain corrupted until the Spectral Processor
FITS file upgrade is performed in the September release.


3. Software status

The software group are checking out M&C release 3.6 - this will be tagged
Monday and released Wednesday. Melinda has completed the PF2 manager, and
will start work with Mark to integrate this into the IF manager. Toney
is making good progress on developing heuristics for configuring the
Spectrometer; Ray has placed the source code for the new configuration
software under change control. Amy, Mark and Brian have discussed strategies
for the Caltech backend review meeting on 6th September. Amy has organized
Spectrometer test time for Kaplan's visit.

Joe will investigate recent DCR problems (difficulties performing long
integrations) to see whether they are amenable to an easy fix.


4.  Spectrometer status

Rich spend most of this week in a servo amplifier course, so had little
time for the Spectrometer. The pulse seen in the correlation function
two weeks ago has vanished. This cannot be explained by software upgrades,
since no changes have been made in this area. Three bad paddle boards
were causing self-test to fail; this has been cured by lubricating them.
Rich has checked out 50MHz 9-level 4-IF 4-Quadrant no-pol mode, and
forwarded data to Rick for inspection.

We have agreed that the next priority for the software group should be
balancing, followed by multi-bank operation (requires review of the
DMA logic as a prerequisite).
 

5.  Receiver status

L-band is cold and available again. X-band should be cold by Monday
morning. K-band is being checked, and should be available on the
telescope by the beginning of October.


6.  Baselines

Work continues to focus on the L-band frequency-switched ripple. Rotating
the receiver demonstrated that the cause is in the optics above the 
receiver. The baseline team are currently out of ideas as to what this
could be... Dana has continued to investigate the Spectral Processor
baseline ripple, primarily with the intent of documenting the problem.


7.  AIPS++ news

Jim and Bob are both away, and Joe is nominally on vacation (although he
actually appears to be working). Joe has primarily been working on
defects and user support, particularly for Darling, who has multiple-IF
data.  Some additional recipes have been produced, and will be added
to the standard documentation. Joe has completed work on the flagging
utilities. The dish import command now supports specification of the
type of Van Vleck correction and smoothing to use.

8.  Schedule

Carl has added some astronomy programs to the weekend schedule. The
first September schedule is now available on the web. A number of
commissioning slots are available.

				RMP // 26 August 2002