USNOVLBASupportMeetingJanuary2020 < NM/Electronics

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Date: January 16, 2020

Time: 11 am Mountain, 1pm Eastern
Phone: 434-817-6468 ext 228111#
Room 220, Socorro

Attending: ?
USNO: ?

VLBA Observations
- Daily Observation Report (N-series)
  - One observation with no fringes due to timing problems at MK. One substitution of LA for PT due to ACU problems.
  - N9365 PT dropped data packets due to internet issues.
- Other Intensive Observations
  - W-series observations underway, will probably run through mid-March 2020.
  - "Emergency" intensive observations at MK beginning December 3.
    - Project code for this observation will be IYYDOY.
    - Kokee fiber fixed.
    - Will continue to substitute MK for KK on federal holidays in 2020 such as 1/20/20 and 2/17/20.
    - Will probably redefine these as "holiday" intensives rather than "emergency" intensives.
  - A MK-WZ observations will run on Saturdays beginning December 7 2019 through March 7 2020.
    - Project code for this observation will be QYYDOY.
    - Will involve a new post-observing procedure for operators to copy the data to correlator in Japan.
  - O-series test of HN-OV baseline continues
    - Will run simultaneous with the N-series observations but will not interrupt other observing.
    - Some access problems due to loss of web portal, considering if they should go public like the other series'.
- Post-Monthly Report Review:
  - Sowders replacement project observed more than its requested eight hours in December.
  - The "emergency" intensives only used four of their requested nine hours in December.
  - Three requested observations didn't get run in December for a total of 21 hours of backlog for January. All three were observed in early January.
- Pre-monthly request
  - The monthly time allotment has been increased to 200 hours.
  - Count on N-series off by one, February 29th appears to have been overlooked.
  - CNxxx observations have concluded.
Open issues
- With SC now having fiber, what, if any, issues would need to be overcome to use SC in conjunction with MK and PT as part of the daily Intensives?
  - Some limits encountered at the correlator with the 3-station run, downloading all three at once was slow.
  - Bandwidth to SC is slower than PT and MK, only getting 180 Mbps (line rated for 200 Mbps).
    - Have worked out how to do the 3-station downloads with the lower BW at SC.
- USNO emails to ut1 list are not being forwarded along to other USNO people.
  - Not an issue with the mailing list itself, something a couple levels up from USNO in the navy.mil network.
  - Mail is being blocked at the Dept. of Defense level, working with them on that. Have not instituted any workarounds yet.
- USNO needs to renew support contract for MK fiber. Paperwork has gone through.
- Networking Support Contract: Contract will be renewed for FY2020.
  - Renewed or not? USNO will check into it.
- Correlator Refresh Contract: Correlator was assembled in November.
  - Lustre filesystem and second set of nodes still awaiting installation in January.
- USNO is moving to new ingest data server and IP address is not working even though it's on NRAO's whitelist. USNO reports attempts to transfer data to the .179 address does not work. Looks like problem might be firewalls at USNO end?
  - Ticket has been submitted, waiting to hear. Still outstanding, no update.
- Transition to Mark6 recording system is underway, including 4 Gbps capability.
  - Tests for transitioning to the higher data rate, perhaps with C-band, will be considered.
    - Mark Claussen will provide some 4 Gbps setups for USNO to look at for the tests.
  - Script for copying intensives from Mark6 pack to Xcube in case of Xcube recording failure has been provided.
  - Might be some USNO funding for more Mark6 disk drives/packs.
- New IVS session code naming structure (long-term issue)
  - There is likely to be a change to format of the IVS "session code", but no earlier than January 2020 and probably later, maybe not until 2021. As the USNO works to make the VLBA intensives look like IVS sessions we want to discuss what impacts such a change might have on this effort. This particularly relates to the 'exper_name' in the .vex files.
  - Intensives are all now using the xYYDDD naming format (ie, N20001, O20001, etc)
  - New IVS codes will be similar to existing codes but perhaps slightly longer, for example "nYYYYDOYNN". USNO & Goddard have discussion about it, length will be more than six characters.
- PT daily intensives experiencing lots of H-code problems in S-band. A few more zeros/no fringes than normal, but still finding fringes most of the time.Seems to have been going on since late last week. Operations' post-observing scan of the data began seeing problems in the switched power levels with N20014. Looks like the PT problems are not causing enough problems with the USNO data to switch to LA, but will update after analysis.
- VLBA able to participate in CONT2020 (Nov-Dec 2020). Won't be a full 15-day session, maybe a "mini-CONT" of around five days. (Long-term issue)
Next regular telecon meeting on February 13.

-- JimOgle - 2020-01-13

Topic revision: r2 - 2020-01-17, JimOgle

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