[mmaimcal] Suggested agenda for the MAC telecon

[Al Wootten]

 MAC meeting this week.  Items we should discuss:

1) Science with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array
   Meeting status, SOC matters.  

2) October MAC meeting

3) New items -- News.  

4) Action list
       a) A plan for deploying the remainder of the receivers after the initial three.
Now that we are ALMA, this will be developed in concert with European partners.
A meeting will occur in Tucson on 30 September.  Recall that a joint WBS should
be in place on or soon after 10 October 1999 to be ratified at the next
meeting of the ACC.

       c) Phase Calibration-necessity for fast switching and implications for hardware; water vapor monitoring- 22 GHz vs 183 GHz lines.
John Carpenter put together some pages on his URSI talk on what is happening at
OVRO; a link to these may be found at:
http://www.alma.nrao.edu/workinggroups/cal_imaging/phasecal.html

       d) Total Power Observations-requirements for receiver stability, 1/f noise, necessity for a chopping secondary, etc.
This was discussed at URSI but there have been no developments since the
URSI discussion last month.

       e) Array Configurations-what are the most useful configurations, especially the most compact ones? We need to understand the pros and cons better.
Min presented the U. S. strawman plan at the URSI meeting and has written
this up in his WWW page at
http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~myun/mma/straw_config.html

       f) OFT Mapping, Focal Plane Arrays, etc.-we need to try to understand how often these are likely to be used and their implications for both software
       and hardware.
Issues of maximum data rate and minimum dump time will be revisited in the
next Imaging and Calibration meeting.  In the project book this is 1MB/s 
average, 10MB/s max sustained, numbers derived from the 40 x 8m array.  
Currently. minimum integration time is 16 ms for cross-corretations and 1 ms 
for autocorrelations.

       g) Testing of the Prototype Telescopes-Where, how long, and what criteria for acceptance?
The plan for prototype testing is being finalized and is due on 27 September
1999.  Note that the first production telescope may differ.

       h) Someone to fill the role of Mark Holdaway-It seems like the project needs someone doing the type of things Mark was doing for the project. 
Mark is working on dynamic scheduling and AIPS++ simulation software.