[evlatests] ACUs -- Old vs New

Rick Perley rperley at nrao.edu
Thu May 29 18:27:06 EDT 2025


I continue to troll through the 'flux density' data, taken earlier this year.

The observations include many long slews between the sources, so I can judge how long it takes the antennas to move from one source to another, when the separation is large.

It is quickly seen there is a major difference between antennas:  ea04, 15, 18 and 20 are always on source before the others.  The difference can be large — up to 30 seconds (!!!) for really big azimuth changes (meaning, about 8.5 minutes for the fast antennas, vs 9 minutes for the slower ones, for a full turn in azimuth.)

What's special about those four antennas?  — They are all 'old' ACU antennas, and indeed are the only remaining 'old' ACU antennas.  (ea05 is 'old', but was out of the array).

Question:  Is this difference expected?

The good news:  For the 'new' antennas, the arrival times on source — even for the very longest slews — are identical — within 1 second even for slews longer than 8 minutes.

Rick




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listmgr.nrao.edu/pipermail/evlatests/attachments/20250529/577bc022/attachment.html>


More information about the evlatests mailing list