[evlatests] ea13 birdie @1400 MHz, ad nauseam

[Dan Mertely]

Rob Selina, Ricardo Contreras, & I went out to ea13 for an
RFI hunting mission and had a lot of success.

One of the main problems was that the LAN switch and media
converters up in the vertex room were plugged into an un-
switched AC outlet.  They should have been plugged into a
switched outlet (LAN devices of all kinds are very noisy!)
Rob re-routed the cables and plugged the wall-wart power
supplies into the proper switched AC outlets.

 >>> I ask that everyone working on antennas be aware of the
fact that the LAN switches and media converters are very, very
RF noisy.  Please make sure that the Vertex Room switches turn
off when the room lights are off, and please also make sure
that the LAN switch and media converter down in the Ped Room
is unplugged when not in use.  This is important. <<<

In addition, the LOIF and Utility rack RF gasketing "fingers"
were greatly damaged due, in part, to a couple of the doors
being misaligned.  We fixed the gaskets & re-aligned the doors
by adding spacing washers on the hinges.

Now ea13 may be one of the quieter antennas out there in L-band.
Please make another check at your convenience.  TNX.
-Mert


On 4/21/2015 10:42 AM, Rob Selina wrote:
> HI Mert,
>
> Will you be out at the site tomorrow? I was hoping we might have some time to talk about EA13's 1400MHz birdie and perhaps go do a sweep at the antenna. Assuming you've looked into this one before, is there any pertinent info in /evla/techdocs/rfi ? I did a quick search but didn't see anything.
>
> We can talk about it tomorrow (hopefully) so I won't write a book here, but the long and short of it is that Emmanuel, Rick and others have suggested that we focus tracking down some of our self-generated RFI, starting with this birdie on EA13. I wanted to see if this was something we  could perhaps work on together.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Rob
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Emmanuel Momjian [mailto:emomjian at aoc.nrao.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2015 8:59 PM
> To: Rob Selina
> Cc: Bryan Butler; Rick Perley
> Subject: ea13 birdie @1400 MHz
>
> Hi Rob,
>
> Attached is a spectrum that shows the birdie of antenna ea13 at 1400 MHz. What I don't recall seeing before are the little spikes near the main feature; there are two on the left and two on the right. These weaker ones are also only seen on baselines to ea13. It looks like the birdie has a whole family now!
>
> The separation between these features is exactly 30 channels, which is
> 468.75 kHz.
>
> cc-ing Rick and Bryan to check if they recall seeing the weaker features before.
>
> These data were taken on April 4, 2015.
>
> I'll look into the 1408 MHz birdie later.
>
> Cheers,
> Emmanuel
>

On 1/20/2013 11:51 AM, Rick Perley wrote:
 > The latest 'spectra sweep' shows clear evidence that ea13 is
 > seriously polluting our spectrum at L-band.  In trolling through the
 > spectra provided from the data, some baselines common to ea13 show
 > strong RFI at multiples of 25 MHz, extending from ~1200 MHz through
 > ~1500 MHz.  There are only a few baselines on which this comb is easily
 > visible -- these are 13 with 9, 14, 24, 25, and 26.  All of these are
 > antennas adjacent to 13!
 >      It's quite clear from this that ea13 is probably the sole source of
 > the interference.
 >
 >