Minutes from SSS Mtg 2008-Sep-09

Attendees: M.Claussen,  D.Harland, B.Hesman,     E.Momjian,
           G.v.Moorsel, F.Owen,    L.Sjouwerman, B.Truitt

Two topics were covered in the meeting today:

1. Scan Summary Reports in the OPT
2. Doppler Tracking

* * *

Scan Summary Reports in the OPT

Brian showed the group the work he had done on this topic. The reports were based on input Lorant provided a few months ago. Mark and Frazer pointed out the importance of having such reports, especially since the new OPT will not create Observe Files. We spent most of the hour on this topic. The following is a list of requested changes on which the programming staff (Brian, actually) will work.

1. Add titles to the tables.
2. In the top table, express Az and El in decimal degrees, with one place after the decimal point.
3. Express HA in hours (as it probably is right now), with two places after the decimal point.
4. Express parallactic angle in decimal degrees.
5. Add integration time to the second table.
6. In the top table, instead of completely unrolling scan loops, allow users to expand, and recollapse, them by hand.
7. Allow users to hide / show columns.
8. Use truncated text in the "flags" column.
9. Eliminate the fourth table and more the frequency columns into the first table.
10. Move the first table to the bottom of the page.

* * *

Doppler Tracking

We spent only a brief moment on this topic. Prior to the meeting, a document was read by the meeting attendees that outlined the changes the programmers intended to make. The group agreed that:

• In the hardware configuration, the only data collected from the user related to Doppler tracking (DT) would be the designation that a given central frequency for an IF is either a sky or rest frequency.
  
  
• When specifying a scan the user will be able to enter DT information for each IF that had been designated as a rest frequency. The information collected will be a tracking velocity & frame, and a tracking position. For both the velocity and position, the user will be able to either enter the values by hand or accept the default, where the velocity and position comes from the source on which the scan is being run.

Lorant also reminded us of the desire on any given scan to be able to say "use the hardware configuration from the previous scan", as opposed to choosing a configuration from the catalog.

Post-Meeting Addendum

Lorant raised some issues about the handling of Doppler tracking of scans that are contained within loops:

1. If each scan in a loop is only a few seconds long, and DT is desired, do we really retune LOs on every scan?
2. If we wanted to apply DT only to the first iteration of the first scan and then leave the LOs alone for all subsequent scans in the loop, and for all subsequent iterations, how would we express that?