[evlatests] L W i T W T W

[Vivek Dhawan]

                Last week, in the WIDAR testing wars...

* Antennas done moving, baselines & pointing updated.

* Power outage for West-arm work. Another outage planned for Tuesday 9th.

* Kerry replaced one baseline board, all working now.

* CBE and subarrays: 3 subarrays, submitted at staggered times, breaks CBE.
               2 seem to run happily, adding the third does it in. Martin is
               pondering, and working on code consolidation.

* 'Busch mode' for asteroid radar, 30KHz bandwidth, 1 subband, 32K channels,
              1 sec dumptime - works with no data loss (Only 3 antennas used,
              at the ends of arms). Turning off the f_shift cleans up spikes
              in the autocorrelations at harmonics of f_shift. Ready for use
              in early November perhaps. see next item.

* Polynomial tracking (Bryan B.) worked in 1 of 3 cases. The reasons are
              understood, I believe. Is it ready for asteroids?

* 4-band dipoles came down Friday, before which several tests were run,
              including first use of 'box dipoles' on ea05. (Frazer, Ravi)

* Nirupam tried 100msec output integration with 512 channels, single subband,
              on a long-period pulsar at P-band. It worked, with little or no
              data lost (i.e. zeros) from CBE.

* Ken ran recirculation tests, 3 x 32MHz subbands, with recirc factor 1,2,4
              to compare them. They are near- identical. This is a 'before'
              test to compare with upcoming changes in the RXP and CM to deal
              with narrow-band recirculation correctly.

* 3-bit tests via OPT: (use WebTEST OPT followed by M2Stest).

            * Moving antennas bothers the 3-bit system: 10A2C2, 28B2D2 are
              not working and will be replaced when spares are available.
              Several other samplers were off, or unhappy and needed resets.
              Some are still slightly hungover. More work on this Monday.

            * CBE is sometimes unhappy with 3-bit scripts run back to back.
              It freezes up and no data gets out. Can be reset, but we are
              reluctant to run such scripts in the mix of science over the
              weekend. An exception was made for Rick's test - see below -
              naturally it worked perfectly with many eyes watching.

            * Juergen + Miller: Bandpasses. This used 3 correlator setups,
              4, 2, and 1-Stokes, with the same LO-IF setup. It caused the
              requantizers to mis-set (or return to default). But the data
              should be OK for the bandpass repeatability test, except for a
              normalizing factor. Miller is processing. Another test is
              ready to run next week.

              I believe Sonja, Ken & Michael understand the issue and are
              thinking of a fix.

            * Mark Claussen also submitted a test, but I did not get to
              it. In fact I've lost all emails on it - probably my fault.
              Mark is back next week.

            * 3-hour K band polarization test. Had a few missing BDF's
              but appeared to be otherwise OK. Rick & Bill Cotton are
              analyzing.

            * Michael ran a test with multiple LO-IF settings,  K, Ka, Q band
              which appears to not set RQ gains correctly. Ken investigated
              and finds the malfunction is not real - again a consequence of
              requantizers returning to default values (?). More on this next
              week, I'm not sure I understand this fully.

* Phased VLA:

            * TY020, a demo/test to make a nice image, worked fine as far as
              we could tell from the phased VLA side. Amy gave vex2OPT its
              first test flight, and found a number of features and bugs
              for improvement.

            * TY018 disks (recorded Sep20th) are finally all here and are
              running through DifX this weekend. This tests repeatability
              of delays for Y27 across different days and bandwidths. The
              source was 3C273 so we might get another usable image out
              of this.


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