New Allen Telescope Array Development

May 14, 2018, Billy Barott and Janusz Kulpa at ERAU - Engineering time
2018-05-14 Observing Notes with Janusz

Today's work was to take the beamformer through some basic paces to look for anything out of the ordinary.

Only beamformer #2 was tested. BF3 was down for maintenance (B15 offline), and BF1 was not testable (ibob i16 was not responding to the bfibob command). Elin reset i16 during the test, but we did not end up using it.

1. Link Health The all-ants initialization of BF2 passed link health. However, later during the observing when using the more-limited antenna list, we had routine link alarms on the Y-polarization list, including BEE5, and BEE4, including ercs and empties. This was not investigated further.
2. Good Antennas Elin's array health script (bestantpols.py) was used to select antennas for the observation. No analysis was put into identifying antennas outside of this list antpols=4jy,2jx,4jx,2ex,2ax,1hx,2bx,2by,3ly,3lx,4gy,5ex,5cx,1ax,4gx,1fx, ants=4j,2j,2e,2a,1h,2b,3l,4g,5e,5c,1a,1f) note that this includes 12 unique antennas. 4x are dual pol. 12x are single pol, for 16 total antpols. Elin emailed after the experiment and noted that there might have been a problem with the auto cal last week, so these might not be representative of the overall array health.
3. Calibration Quality the antennas mostly calibrated well. Minor irregularities were observed in BEE2FPFA3 link (on the X-pol, exact refant not investigated further), which had a high and fluctuating RMS value and difficulty calibrating the delay. I suspect this could have been solar interference on the baseline, although no further investigation was conducted.
4. Hydrogen

* REST OF PAGE IS WIP FROM OBS NOTES *