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M&C 8.3 Release Notes

Released on Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Also, see the sdfits v1.12 Release Notes and GBTIDL v2.3.1 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
    • Active Surface
    • Antenna
    • The sampler2log Program
    • The Zpectrometer
  • Data Analysis
    • SDFITS
    • GBTIDL
• Known Issues
  • Power Supply 2 in Motor Rack (remains from last cycle)
  • Archivist Use

Testing Activities

New Features and Improvements

M&C System

Active Surface

• A new set of Zernike coefficients was added to the Active Surface Manager to support ongoing Out-of-Focus Holography (OOF) work.
  • There is a new Manager Parameter, which is a 36-element array named "thermal_zernike_coefficients".
  • A new option, "thermal_zernike", was added to the "correctionSelect" Manager Parameter. Setting this option to 1 will activate the thermal Zernike processing.
  • A new FITS binary table has been added to the Active Surface engineering FITS file. The table is only written when the thermal Zernike is selected and the 'write_data' Manager Parameter is selected. The thermal Zernike binary table is identical in content to the Zernike binary table. The FITS file version number has been updated to 2.4.
  • Important Note: Currently, the coefficients loaded in the "thermal_zernike_coefficients" Parameter can only be accessed through CLEO Device Explorer or via a custom Python script. Access to these coefficients via the CLEO Active Surface Manager display will be added at a later time.
• The revision information of the Active Surface actuator zero-point data file, (SurfaceActZeros.conf), is now recorded to the engineering FITS file. The new FITS keyword is "ACTZEROV" and is described in the Active Surface FITS Specification.

Antenna

• The analog sampling of Servo Monitor has been changed from 50Hz to 200Hz to meet Nyquist rate requirements. Additionally, the Samplers which were previously named ServoMonitor_ServoMonitor_*50Hz have been renamed to ServoMonitor_ServoMonitor_*FastRate so that future changes in sampling rate are not explicitly tied to the Sampler name. Fast sampled data will be decimated to 10Hz using the new sampler2log changes introduced in this release.
• Two minor changes/fixes for the pointing model were made. The first is a revision to the method used to generate the velocity input for the pointing model; the second is a change on how rapidly thermal pointing corrections are incorporated into the command stream. Users will not note any degradation in antenna pointing.

The sampler2log Program

The logging program sampler2log now supports options for insertion of a low-pass filter on logged data. This is intended to support the increased sampling rate of the servo-monitoring system. Note: This addition also removes support for the Solaris versions of sampler2log and Archivist daemons. (This will not impact any observing, as the Linux versions are fully supported.)

The Zpectrometer

• A problem has been fixed in the Zpectrometer that would cause it to crash during a scan or when using the genericKeyword parameter
• A parameter/hardware synchronization issue has been fixed. The symptom was a mismatch between the attenuation parameters in the manager and the values used by the wasp2 software during any scan that occurred after a cwsigs scan.
• Two new fields have been added to the power supply sampler, SwPwr and TotPwr

Data Analysis

SDFITS

• More early GBT data can now be filled by sdfits. This includes the sdfits 1.11 release from one month ago which fixed a more serious bug and frequency-switched data in a few projects.
• For more details, see the sdfits v1.12 release notes.

GBTIDL

• Highlights
  • gshow now shows negative Gaussians
  • wtarray in ave now works as advertised
  • The portion of the Goddard IDL library distributed with GBTIDL has been updated to better support large FITS files.
  • Recent data from the KP12m (formerly NRAO 12m) can now be converted to GBTIDL
• 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.

Archivist Use

• The Archivist currently has problems crashing and/or not recording the requested data. Most users have not been using this optional program.
• Use of the Archivist program (a manager which writes log data) is currently not supported. The Archivist can still be used, but only at the risk of the observer.
• An alternative is to use sampler2log which stores the same information, but does not tie the data to specific scans, i.e., it collects data for a specified duration and stores it in /home/gbtlogs/ rather than project directory. Note than many samplers may already be available since they are being logged continuously by the control system.