NRAO Home  >  Green Bank  |  Wiki Topic:    GB > Software > SoftwareReportCentral_ReleaseNotes > ReleaseNotes_7_5

Changes | Index | Contents | Search | Statistics | Go

M&C 7.5 Release Notes

Released on Wednesday, August 15, 2007 from 13:00-17:00

Also, see the sdfits v1.8 Release Notes and GBTIDL v2.2 Release Notes All other previous and current M&C evaluation and release reports are available at SoftwareReportCentral.

• Testing Activities
• New Features and Improvements
  • M&C System
    • Ka Receiver
    • Antenna
    • Zpectrometer
  • Observing System & Applications
    • Turtle (Observing Scripts)
    • GFM
  • Data Analysis
    • SDFITS
    • GBTIDL
• Known Issues
  • Power Supply 2 in Motor Rack (remains from last cycle)
  • IF Manager connection failure messages from dependent child Managers (remains from last cycle)
  • MM Converter Manager (remains from last cycle)

Testing Activities

New Features and Improvements

M&C System

Ka Receiver

• The receiver calibration FITS format has been changed (FITSVERS 2.2) in order to document the polarization angle for those receivers measuring linear polarization.
• A comment has been temporarily added to the Ka FITS header indicating the 45-degree offset for linear polarization used by this receiver.

Antenna

• The antenna controller has been revised to implement a new pointing model, termed 'Model-5' or 'PFM5'. Most users will not be concerned with the details of the differences, however they are described in detail by the modification request. Users should also be aware that the GBT's track has recently been reconstructed, and at the time of the release, has not yet been characterized. To denote the revision, the header keyword FITSVERS has been set to '2.11'. Documentation for the antenna FITS file format is available at: here.
• An additional gregorian pointing model entry 'Model4f', has been added. This model is 'Model4c', with the track maps set to zero. Since the PFM5 antenna code does not recognize the old table format, selection of either 'Model4f' or 'Model4c' will produce the same results, however for clarity use 'Model4f'.

Zpectrometer

• The Zpectrometer Manager has been updated to provide the Scan Coordinator with the proper start time, and to start initialization of the Zpectrometer backends 5 seconds prior to scan start. This has the effect of ensuring that the Zpectrometer software starts initializing the Zpectrometer backends during the same period of time that other devices are activating, and therefore that its scan will start at the same time as all other devices start theirs, eliminating about 5 seconds of extra overhead that was noted the last time the Zpectrometer was on the telescope.

Observing System & Applications

Turtle (Observing Scripts)

• Last year the parameter names and usage for specifying offset in scan types were modified. The older usage was deprecated which resulted in the generation of warning messages that the older nomenclature was soon to be disallowed. The grace time is over, older syntax will now generate errors. See the documentation for correct use.
• Observing scripts now have the capability to access the various M&C Managers' Sampler values via a new observing directive, GetSample().
• A bug that caused subreflector parameters settings to be cleared at the start of each scan has been fixed. Subreflector parameters settings are now cleared at the end of a scan. This allows subreflector parameters to be set in observing scripts via SetValue() observing directive.

GFM

• Until such time that gfm is able to properly handle Ka data, the processing of focus and pointing scans will by default be handled in raw mode.
• IF numbering now matches that used by GBTIDL (sorted by ascending center frequency except in a few rare cases).

Data Analysis

SDFITS

• Highlights
  • OBJECT now holds 32 characters
  • SCAN now holds long integers (32 bit)
  • The index file (used by GBTIDL) has been reformatted to hold these potentially larger integers
  • VELDEF is now set correctly for true (relativistic) velocities.
• For more details, see the Sdfits release notes.

GBTIDL

• Highlights
  • Data selection by sampler name is now available in all routines where data selection happens (e.g. getfs, getnod, find, etc).
  • New functions are now available to convert between sampler name and ifnum, plnum, and fdnum values.
  • scan_info now includes sampler names.
  • A bug in the marking of spectral lines (molecule and the recomb set of procedures) has been fixed. The source velocity shift was being applied in the wrong direction.
  • Supports the wider columns now produced by SDFITS as well as INT and NSAVE used by GBTIDL.
  • Can now unflag all flags in a single use of unflag.
  • bias has a new buffer keyword.
  • Improved appearance of Gaussian profiles when zoomed.
  • A bug in the /noclear option of avgstack has been fixed.
  • kget now checks for empty data before attempting to get the data.
• For more details, see the GBTIDL release notes.

Known Issues

Power Supply 2 in Motor Rack (remains from last cycle)

• Power supply 2 in the Motor Rack has a hardware problem. It always shows failed and the logs are not written.

IF Manager connection failure messages from dependent child Managers (remains from last cycle)

• During version changes, several child Managers of Managers with IF Manager dependencies reported RPC connection errors with the IF Manager. In every case, it was just one of the child Managers of each Manager reporting the problem.

MM Converter Manager (remains from last cycle)

• The Millimeter Converter Manager attempts to read the MCB bus even when it is off, causing error messages to be generated when the hardware is not installed.