Parkes Spectrometer, Full Stokes Version

Peter McMahon created a very capable pulsar data acquision based on the U.C. Berkeley blocks. His design was amoung the first to use the 10 GigaBit ethernet communications blocks.

There are several versions of the design that have different configuration requirements. In addition, the IBOBs are connected to different host computers with different configuration parameters.

• Beef
• Tofu
• Cicada2

Summer 2008

During the summer of 2008, Marc Eimer, Duncan Lorimer and Glen Langston assembled a parspec design that obtained data from the NRAO 43m Telescope and record data in the pulsar spectrometer mode. Paul Demorest, Scott Ransom, John Ford, Randy McCullogh and Jason Ray made many valuable contributions to the system setup and advice on data acquisition and networking.

The PARSPEC design uses a U.C. Berkeley IBob board for input.

Marc Eimer and Glen Langston set up the Parspec design with input from the Fake Pulsar. These tests went well, but there were some questions concerning the test pulsar outputs. Mark has written a test report.

Fall 2008

After the end of summer 2008, the computer configuration was radically changed, and we lost the ability to use the GUI with the parspec design. On 2008 December 16, Vlad Kondratiev, Paul Demorest and Glen Langston revised the software for communications between the IBOB and the computer tofu.gb.nrao.edu.

We had to make a number of changes to a number of scripts. These changes are tabulated below:

• TOFU replaces BEEF as data acquisition computer. Edited scripts to reference new executable location.
  • Executable is /data/scratch/glangsto/parspec/gui
• Data acquisition directory: /data/scratch/glangsto/parspec

---

Parspec GUI	Monitor Plot of Stokes I, Q, U and V
IBOB commands in telnet session	Folded data taken with Parspec Stokes using the Artificial (Fake) pulsar