GBT Operations and Commissioning Meeting 23 January 2004 AGENDA 1. Az Track and Telescope Status -- Bob 2. Observing News -- Karen 3. Frontends, IFs, and Spectral Baselines -- Roger 4. Spectrometer Status -- Rich 5. Software Status -- Amy 6. Scheduling Status -- Carl 7. Project Planning Status -- John 8. Any other Business REPORTS 1. Az Track and Telescope Status Az Track Progress continues on the finite element analyses. Will bring a couple of slides for show and tell. El Shaft Dr. Keating has sent a draft of his report to Modjeski and Masters, and they are resolving some comments. One step closer, but we haven't received their recommendations yet. -- RAA 2. Observing News Observing Report Jan 16-22, 2004 Summary of observing: Project PI total hrs System 3C-18 Mayo 14.5 L/Spectral Processor 3C-24 Troland 38.5 L/Spectral Processor 3C-6 Bergin 39.5 K/Spectrometer 2C-30 Lo 16.0 K/Spectrometer 3B-26 Roberts 2 L/800 BCPM 3B-27 Kuan 15 K/Spectrometer CGSR2 Jacoby 2 L/CGSR2 Qband Ghigo 5 Q/? Problems summary: (1) DCR missed start tick: time lost: 1 minute (3C-6) 4 hours (2C-30) fixed (hopefully) on Jan 22. (2) Spectral processor hung in stopping during GO table took 3-4 aborts to kill observing each time Dies ~2-3 times in any 12 hours period its being run total time lost ??? lots.... (3) Spectrometer failure (reset itself) failed four times in one run total time lost: 35 minutes (2B-27) (4) Spectrometer failure due to removing spigot card total time lost: 1.5 hours (5) Servo failure on sub-reflector water on connector. had to be replaced total time lost: 4.2 hours (6) Servo failure on AZ motor controller drives were disabled and then re-enabled to clear problem total time lost: 45 minutes (7) Accessor on vortex filed reset eio1 and turned accessor off & on to fix problem total time lost: 15 minutes Total Time: Observing (scheduled): 137.5 Time lost, hardware/software: 11.2 hours + lost time due to spectral processor failure combined with inability to readily stop GO tables Time lost, Weather - 7.5 hours lost -- KO'N 3. Frontends, IFs, and Spectral Baselines 4. Spectrometer Status ****Status***** The system works well most of the time, but has an unusually long list of ailments at the moment: - Still get occasional 1024-lag-long pulses in auto-correlation function. In a recent observation (Swift) 3% of the scans were contaminated in this way. Holly is looking into this. - Have been getting occasional self-reboots of the spectrometer control computer, earth, lately. SDD has agreed to remove some extraneous, recently added tasks to see if this will help. Last night's log says we had a reboot and the extra tasks were not in there. There has also been an operating system upgrade recently... - The spectrometer fails self-test dramatically when either spigot card is removed. It worked for years without spigot cards. This resulted in about 6 hours of lost time since we tried about everything else we could think of before re-installing the spigot card. Rich is looking into this. - One spigot card is still broken. - Fred Schwab sees no flaws in the spigot data scaling for transmitting 8, 4, or 2 bits instead of 16 to the spigot computer. However, normal drifts in the system power cause the 4 and 2-bit modes to saturate quickly. Some modifications to the system will be necessary to get these modes to be useful. ****Development**** - LTA replacement: Xilinx simulation continues. - Karen has run several tests. These will be reported separately. ****Plans**** - Continue work on 1024-lag-long faults and spigot hardware problems. - Continue work on LTA replacement and cross-correlation test fixture. -- Rich and Holly 5. Software Status Single Dish Development IPT #66 - Friday, January 23, 2004 Today ends week 3 of 6 in the current development cycle. The Plan of Record is now available from the wiki at Software.PlanOfRecordC12004 along with the most up-to-date status information. Work on the active surface zernike polynomial coefficients has been tentatively marked as complete. The work requires verification from members of the PTCS scientific staff. For ease of use and data analysis, the new beta data display is being integrated with a generic plotting and flagging tool; work on this is almost complete (completion by 1/30). Also, some additional smaller enhancements to the data display are in progress. The informal SDD-only demo initially scheduled for this week has been moved to late next week. A prototype generic DCR plugin for the data display beta has been created and will provide the requirements for a production plugin. An MR will be written next week that captures the requirements extracted from the prototype and, upon MR sponsor approval, work will commence on the production plugin. The gap analysis for spectroscopy capabilities and support of collimation for PTCS has also continued this week. 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. Progress on the Observing API continues. The Peak procedure is now working on the simulated antenna. Nod, OnOff, and RALongMap are expected to work on the simulated antenna by the end of the week. The coding of the DecLatMap and PointMap procedures will be addressed next week and tested on the simulated antenna. The SDD provided a large amount of operational support this week, which mainly focused on the fixing of the "missed start tick" problem with the DCR. A patch to the DCR code was added and tested on Thursday which involved reversing the priorities of the server and sequencer tasks and making the setting and use of activated values mutually exclusive. This patch replaces a previous patch which simply added a delay between DCR scans. Please contact Mark Clark or another member of the SDD if any further problems with the start tick are encountered. Also, the Antenna Characterization errors with Antenna SOAP connection are now fixed and the host machine for the Manager has changed (removed from earth). -- AS 6. Scheduling Status Last Week ========= Observations for proposals GBT02C-030, GBT03C-024, GBT03B-026, GBT03B-027, GBT03C-006, GBT03C-018 Completed proposals GBT03C-024, GBT03C-018 Next Week ========= Observations scheduled for GBT02C-008 [B] PI Jeremy Darling A Blind HI Survey for Damped Lyman alpha Absorbers GBT02A-063 [P] PI Mark Claussen Water Maser Monitoring of Low and Intermediate Mass Young Stellar Objects GBT02C-030 [P] PI Fred Lo GBT Search for Very Luminous H2O Megamasers GBT03A-023 PI Ingrid Stairs Timing Binary Pulsars at the GBT GBT02C-020 [B] PI Chris Henkel A 6 GHz Survey of Extra-galactic OH Megamasers GBT02C-054 [P] PI James Braatz Measuring Nuclear Disks in NGC 1386 and IC 2560 (H2O) GBT02A-046 [P] PI James Braatz Monitoring a Maser Disk in Mrk 1419 January ======= Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 509 [107] Maintenance ~ 62 [18] Tests & Comm ~ 173 [9] February ======== Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 391 [251] Maintenance ~ [141] Tests & Comm ~ 299 [35] Un-assigned ~ 7 March ===== Scheduled hours [backup] Astronomy ~ 203 Maintenance ~ 2 [159] Tests & Comm ~ 87 Un-assigned ~ 452 Proposal Checkouts ================== Awaiting checkout - 18 Active checkout - 23 On Hold - 7 Schedule - 44 Completed - 136 -- RCB 7. Project Planning Status January 20, 2004 Planning Meeting Minutes Rm 137 10:00 A.M. [0] Observer comments & operator log items to discuss E. Bergin comments Summary: AIPS++ too slow, asks for CLASS. Dynamic scheduling a pain. Remote observing desired. Discussions here centered around plans to support remote observing. A real remote observing system is some time away, but it was stated that we can do some remote observing with some astronomers for some programs. We are going to develop a remote observing strategy over the next months, and attempt to implement remote observing when we can. [1] Resource calendar schedule conflicts and discussions Chris Clark needs a day to change Prospero out. Scheduled for 1st day next week. mmello also has work scheduled for the same time. Chris wins. Melinda can do her tests after the 2 hour computing shutdown. Nicole will adjust the times. [N.B. After the meeting, we decided that the practice of putting maintenance items on Monday and Tuesday was unworkable, and changed that to Saturday and Sunday. A better tool to manage this is needed. Obviously. ] [2] Observing Schedule discussions Carl needs time requests for tests for March. Q band needs to be scheduled, but commissioning has been delayed by several factors. Some VLBI at Q band is already on the schedule. [3] GBT development planning Meetings Wednesday of this week. Richard was not available to expound on this. [4] AOB Amy Shelton will be the SDD contact while Nicole is out for the next few weeks. There was some more AOB, but I lost my notes! -- JF 8. Any other Business