[evlatests] Adventures from last night

[Joseph P. McMullin]

Hi Rick,
For point 2 - we were bitten again by the use of the combination of dwell
time in the OPT and array time in the
model-to-script. I set this up to run the night before using array time to
provide some flexibility in case of earlier
failures or needing to shift the observation (e.g., to support observing it
5 minutes off the UV-grid you had before).
However, the slews for the dwell time would have been calculated at the time
of the model-to-script conversion
so completely inappropriate for when it was run.
Given that dwell times are not often used, we (I) need a warning when this
mode is being employed so we don't
stumble on this again.
The other CBE/lustre issues need to be summarized.
Joe

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Rick Perley <rperley at nrao.edu> wrote:

>    The 9.5 hour observation of Herc-A taken last night was not a major
> success.  Many odd things occurred.
>
>    1) The most obvious failure is a nearly 4-hour gap in the archive,
> from 12:56 IAT through 16:37 IAT.
>
>    2) A more subtle problem is the lack of visibility data from both
> polarization calibrators, 3C286 and J1504+1029.  Observations of these
> sources required moderate to large slews.  It is clear after careful
> examination that the system greatly underestimated slew times.  I
> utilized the 'on source' timing in the OPT -- this worked beautifully
> for the massive 'flux densities' run, but has failed in the Herc A run.
> In general, since I used a loop through the bands such that S-band was
> always observed last, I did get S-band data for most of the polarization
> calibration attempts.
>
>    3) There are blocks of missing scans.  The first occurred on the
> initial observation of 3C286 -- the L and X band observations are
> present, but the following observations at C-band and S-band are
> completely missing (and there is a 3 minute time gap corresponding to
> where  the data should have been).  Data flowed again on the following
> L-band scan.  The IAT times for this gap are 07:52:22 through 07:55:33 (
> 00:52 through 00:55 in local time).
>    Later on, a much larger gap -- 10 minutes occurred, again following
> a X-band observation (when the next observation would be at C-band).
> The time range here was 09:02:17 to 09:12:48.
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Joseph P. McMullin
EVLA
Ph: +1 575 835 7315
E-mail: jmcmulli at nrao.edu
http://science.nrao.edu/evla/
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