Agenda

CASA/JIVE VLBI Coordination Meeting

2019 June 28 @ 1400UTC

Logistics

• Future Meeting dates (usually last Wed of the month):
  
  • 2019 Jul 31? (George has conflict)
  • 2019 Aug 28?
  • 2019 Sep 25?

General Admin

• CASA 5.6/6.0
  
  • CASA 5.6 Confluence page
  • Feature freeze: 2019 Jun 07
    • Currently in validation/bug-fixing period, release branch in next few weeks
    • Public CASA 5.6/6.0 release by end of July
    • ALMA/EVLA pipeline release by Oct 1.
• EHT-related article planned for next newsletter, expected ~alongside CASA 5.6 pipeline release
  • Probably a contribution from Michael Janssen, via Ilse
• (Mark) EHT polarization workshop
  • In Bonn, in July; EHT members only. Mark may adapt some ad hoc resolved-calibrator polarization-calibration scripts as tasks.
• (Mark) Summer student at JIVE investigating scpetral line VLBI with CASA
• Jay Blanchard now in Socorro, cultivating interest in CASA VLBI (also SRDP)
  • Some discussion of fringefit in recent local CASA User group meetings
• (Ryan) CASA Next Generation Infrastructure
  • Trade studies ongoing...
• Other admin?

Development/Features

• (Mark) Requirements collation ConsolidatedRequirements....Any news? Janssen contribution?
• VLBI Integration branch: CAS-12325
  • Any issues?
• Items for CASA 5.6/6.0 development
  
  • (George) CASA 6 VLBI task interface verification
    • (Mark) fringefit task: coordinating with Bob Garwood. OK?
    • (Mark) fringefit unittest using real data: Status?
  • (George) Calibration changes ~relevant to VLBI:
    • CAS-6747: Relative frequency interpolation for channel-dependent calibration
    • CAS-11552: Updates to multiband delay solves in gaincal for heterogeneous spws
      • SolveDataBuffer::centroidFreq / SDList::aggregateCentroidFreq. (cf SDBList::centrodFreq added for fringefit)
  • (George) Look into correlation-dependent flagging issue (CAS-695)
    • No progress, unfortunately. Defer to 5.7.
  • (Des) Dispersive term
    
    • (Des) CAS-12493: Extended fringefit CalTable for dispersive term support
      • PR #995 pending. Awaiting final validation?
      • (User warning since not backward compatible?)
    • (Des) Work on actual solve ongoing for CASA 5.7, including user control and an FFT-based option for estimating the dispersive term.
  • (Des) CAS-12480: fringefit performance/stability issues traced to neglecting some terms in fit accumulations; now on track to validate for 5.6
    • PR #984 merged June 4
  • (Des) CAS-xxxxx? fringefit weighting control implemented
    • Status?
  • (Des) CAS-12501 Iteration control (niter) for fringefit
    • PR #994 merged June 26
  • (Des) Baseline stacking
  • (Des) Wide bandwidth
  • (George) perscan interpolation option? (5.7)
  • (George) consider overlapping solution intervals? (5.7)
  • (Walter) Advanced VLBA Amplitude calibration a la Walker memo from a few years ago
    • Bandpass normalization flexibility: voltage vs. power

Verification/Validation/Documentation

• (Jay) Testing of fringe fitting with a model... status?
  • (George) Confer with Kumar on improving warnings for convolved model images or with wrong units
    • TBD
• (Mark/George) Status of recent casacore changes?
  • SIGMA/WEIGHT storage manager fix
  • FITSIDI Single-band case

AOB?