[evlatests] P-band switched power observed at S-band
Dan Mertely
dmertely at nrao.edu
Fri Jun 17 17:57:44 EDT 2016
Not being a cooled FE, the P-band receiver
would be easy to turn off, on request. -Mert
On 6/17/2016 3:48 PM, Barry Clark wrote:
> A nice piece of work. We should do something about the problem.
>
> I still worry that as well as the cal, some receiver noise from
> the P band might be leaking in. It can't be much, as Fraser says
> it didn't show up on stress test gains, but it might be more
> sensitive to use this approach to see if S band psum changes
> when the P band receiver is turned off.
>
> The simplest fix for most purposes is to run the S-Band Pcal
> at half the frequency as the other cals (or twice the frequency,
> or displaced in phase by 90 degrees). Paul will hate this
> suggestion - it does nothing to help the pulsar problem.
>
> On 06/17/2016 02:42 PM, Paul Demorest wrote:
>> hi everyone,
>>
>> While looking into various switched power issues recently, I noticed
>> that the state of the low-band (4/P) cal switching causes a significant
>> change in switched power (aka Pdif) measurements done at S-band. This
>> is not a subtle effect; for several antennas the S-band Pdif changes by
>> a factor of ~1.5 to 2 (!) when the low-band cals are switching.
>>
>> Note this is _not_ the same effect as the gain modulations that lead to
>> apparent "Pdif compression" as we have also been discussing recently. As
>> far as I can tell, the low-band cal switching has no detectable effect
>> on the amplifier gains at S-band. Rather, the effect observed here is
>> that when the low-band cals are switching, there is an extra amount of
>> switched power added to the S-band Pdif.
>>
>> This is easy to test by separately controlling the state of the P- and
>> S-band cal switching and plotting the resulting Pdif values vs time, as
>> produced by the correlator and recorded in the SDM switched power table.
>> The attached three plots show the results of this for three different
>> antennas. In these plots, the red labels and dashed lines show which
>> cals were enabled at different times during the test. All cals other
>> than P and S were disabled the entire time. Note that at each scan
>> boundary (black dashed lines) the system temporarily reverts to the
>> default state (both S+P cals on) until I send a command to change it.
>>
>> The different antennas show a wide range of behavior: ea01 looks great
>> - a consistent S-band Pdif is seen independent of P-band, and the Pdif
>> level goes to zero when the cals are turned off. In contrast, for ea03
>> the amount of switched power coming from P-band seems comparable to that
>> coming from the S-band cal itself! (ea03 was the worst case in this
>> test.) The third one shown here, ea05, is somewhere in between with a
>> ~10% effect.
>>
>> This is summarized for all antennas in the table below, which shows the
>> ratio of the P-band-only to S-band-only Pdif values, sorted by the IF-A
>> value. The starred antennas are those with 4-band MJPs installed (at
>> least according to the war room white board); there does not seem to be
>> much correlation between this and the Pdif values.
>>
>> I have not yet looked at this effect on receivers besides S, or checked
>> carefully for frequency dependence within S-band (this test used a
>> single 128 MHz subband centered at 3.0 GHz); I may look into this some
>> more in the near future. Other questions, comments, suggestions are
>> welcome.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Paul
>>
>> ----
>>
>> P/S Pdif ratios
>>
>> Ant IF-A IF-B IF-C IF-D
>> ea03* 0.758 0.763 1.355 1.350
>> ea07 0.503 0.492 0.512 0.506
>> ea09* 0.416 0.422 0.292 0.286
>> ea15 0.400 0.400 0.282 0.295
>> ea25 0.247 0.299 0.015 -0.014
>> ea21 0.244 0.248 0.457 0.498
>> ea26 0.151 0.158 0.125 0.116
>> ea12* 0.136 0.133 0.494 0.474
>> ea05* 0.119 0.122 0.077 0.074
>> ea14* 0.112 0.116 0.147 0.146
>> ea28 0.097 0.102 0.065 0.065
>> ea23* 0.086 0.087 0.167 0.179
>> ea04 0.074 0.077 0.061 0.057
>> ea16 0.072 0.072 0.073 0.070
>> ea13* 0.065 0.057 0.029 0.030
>> ea24 0.061 0.060 0.060 0.060
>> ea27* 0.054 0.054 0.057 0.059
>> ea17 0.050 0.048 0.069 0.050
>> ea06* 0.044 0.044 0.049 0.049
>> ea22 0.039 0.036 0.054 0.063
>> ea20 0.038 0.037 0.048 0.051
>> ea19* 0.023 0.024 0.008 0.008
>> ea18* 0.002 0.001 0.006 0.006
>> ea01* -0.000 -0.000 -0.000 -0.000
>> ea10* -0.001 -0.000 0.004 0.004
>> ea11* -0.008 -0.007 -0.021 -0.021
>>
>>
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