[evlatests] activities of May 11, 2006

[Ken Sowinski]

There was enough confusion today that about all I can do is
make a list of observations and perceived problems.

Early in the morning Walter carried out simple holography
raster at Q, K and X bands with and without referenced pointing.
He will report on this separately.

Software time was used by me and Barry with timeouts for a TOO
observation and confusion caused by trying to get the VLBI at
the VLA equipment back in to order.

With much confusion on my part P band was shown to sort of work.
Signal levels into the T304s are so weak that even with the
attenuators set to (0,0) there was barely enough power to drive
the T5 and even then the SD was not very robust.  Weak fringes
were seem on BD and very weak fringes on AC.  There seemed to be
a strong phase wind on BD but no attempt was made to see if it
was related to antenna 14 or just a property of the source and
the day.  Fringes were real because the went away when antenna 14
was pointed off source.

The L301-2 in antenna 13 was not working and could not be telnet'ed
to.  Later in the day I discussed this with Rob and he was able
to talk to it with the device broswer and rebooted it. He suspects
that work at the antenna yesterday glitched power to the module/mib
and left it in an undetected funny state.

The deformatter in 14C was rebooted yesterday because of suspected
file system access problems.  It came up with the FIR gain parameter
set somewhere funny and I was only able to reset it with the device
browser.  I will have a look at what commands the executor claims
to be sending to it.

In trying to make antenna 14 stow I discovered that the ACU screen
wants to stow an antenna by giving it a commanded elevation of 90
degrees.  This does not work because it is quickly overwritten by
the executor and the antenna continues pointing.  The ACU screen
used to send a 'stow' mode command and should do so again.

We continue to see ten second glitches in antenna 13 even after
swapping the l302-1 yesterday.  There is evidence that we see
this in BD as well as AC, so the most likely implicatino is that
the L305 is at fault.  There will be obervations this evening at
all bands with 0.4 second integration time to see if we can learn
more about this, and also to see if there are other problems.