Meetings/20090717

Catch up discussion and review draft PRB report

Agenda

There was no prepared agenda

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Minutes

Discussion of progress vs Schedule

Stage2

Our last PRB report said we should have released Stage2 by 2009 May.
How much work is left?

After some hands-on experience with CABB it seems we don't need the bbcal script.
There are two many variations to handle, people seem happy to write their own shell scripts.
The uvsplit changes were done some time ago. So can we call this done, and in fact released?
We'll take the completion date to be 2009-05-31.

ticket:78 perhaps belongs in stage 5. Ditto ticket:79, but it looks simple to do.

So we're not quite there yet.

Stage3

Wait for zoom bands to be ready. First scheduled observations are ​2009 Sep 18.
The initial mode will be 2048 channels over 1MHz - similar to the 4MHz/2048 channel mode beloved by OH maser observers.

Stage 4

uvacflag is implemented, but automatically flagging cross-correlations from the autocorrelations turns out to be impractical - the bandpass has too much structure for it to be easy to distinguish RFI that affects cross-correlations. Drop this component.

Single-dish observing modes - unclear how much use there would be. This needs to go to ATUC for consideration of priority.

Stage 5

handle time-varying bandpass functions is actually needed.
The cause of this still not understood, details may affect the implementation and advice we give to people.

leakage terms do appear to vary significantly across the bandpass.

We need to handle Tsys varying across the band as well.

We have the on/off data in the RPFITS file but aren't using it yet
We need to know how the temperature of the calibration diode changes with frequency (T_cal(f)) - this requires engineering work

Other issues that could affect the schedule

• large integers in FORTRAN (ticket:67, ticket:72, ticket:81, ticket:85) need a generic solution but that's a lot of work. There are workarounds.
• baseline calibration errors - not our problem, it seems (no remedial software required).

General discussion

• Emil won a prize for his image of PictorA (FIXME: link) !
• MarkW still not getting enough uninterrupted time for this work, esp. the stage 5 bits that need more concentration.
  Farm some work out to EuanTroup??
• Dave will raise issue of replacement Project Leader with PRB at their meeting on 22 July.
• Skip next meeting, Dave too busy.
• Expenditure data from 2009-Feb-01 to 2009-Jun-30: $7,827 (labour), $5,665 (overhead).

Actions

• MarkW to discuss what changes are likely to be needed to gpcopy to handle zoom bands, with Warwick Wilson and Dick Ferris, e.g. will bandpass correction be needed?
• Dave will raise issue of replacement Project Leader with PRB at their meeting on 22 July.
• Vince to resubmit PRB dashboard, with some cheat notes for Dave to consult during the meeting.
• Vince to ask ATUC regarding single-dish observing mode. Does anyone want Mopra-x-6?

Participants

• Dave
• MarkW
• Emil
• Vince

Jamie en route to Parkes open day, sent apology

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