VEGAS Team Meeting

January 30, 2012

Attendees

• CASPER Team:
  • Dan Werthheimer
  • Glenn Jones
  • Mark Wagner
  • Andrew Siemion

• NRAO:
  • John Ford
  • Jason Ray
  • Randy McCullough
  • Mark Whitehead
  • Patrick Brandt
  • Galen Watts
  • Marty Bloss
  • Anish Roshi

Meeting Notes:

• March Testing Status
  • Mode 1 working and tested at high clock rate
    • Changes implemented and tested - last clock rate achieved is 362.5 MHz on a similar spectrometer
  • IF/LO hardware
    • Circuit board fabrication underway
  • Config Tool/Balancing
    • MR ready for checking by software group
  • ADC testing
    • Used a Roach 1 board, two ADCs and valon synthesizer, two uncorrelated noise sources for testing
    • Reviewed results of tests on the National and ASIAA ADCs
    • Recommend ASIAA 5G ADC for purchase
      • Using the actual FPGA code we can do Allan-variance tests - it would be good to run soon if we think it will influence the purchase decision
    • Anish will document and publish findings this week
    • NRAO will send remaining 5G ADC to UC-B.
  • Gathering of Roach and ADC hardware
    • Reviewed the checklist that Jason built for the hardware items for the March test.
    • There is a strong preference for the overall configuration to mimic the final configuration. Plan for eight Valons for the test at this point.
  • NRAO Modification Request (MR) status: Noted as 'VEGAS' in NRAO Plan of Record
  • Software integration tasks
    • Integrated testing of VEGAS manager with other GBT software and checking the data with GBTIDL.
    • Testing the VEGAS Manager along with GBTIDL to see whether the state integration is done correctly.
    • Testing VEGAS configuration for mode 1 (and 13) using config tool.

• Plots from ADC tests
  • Plots from ADC testing as of January 30, 2012 (Zip File)