This is a largely unedited log containing some notes from the CP2 Master Techs during SCMS. All but minor editorial changes are shown as bracketed [ ] text.
This log is not to be considered inclusive, but is likely to be useful in determining causes for some systems problems that are reflected in the various CP2 data streams. This log is included for completeness of the CP2 SCMS record. Much of this log, and particularly the nomenclature, may be unclear to those who are not familiar with the hardware used for CP2.
Lines are used to bracket periods of continuous notes.
Notes Provided by: J. Vinson / NCAR Remote Sensing Facility / vinson@ucar.edu
07-Jul-95 Came in and the Nova would not say "ok". Had an overcurrent indication on the front panel power supply. By unplugging several cards and reducing the load, was able to get the ok light to come on, but decided I had some sort of an overload condition with the Nova. I removed the power supply pc board and tightened up all the screws and re-installed it. Then the Nova started up and ran the rest of the day. Did an S band and X band calibration. X band tx power 50.5 dbm. Radome temperature 90 degrees F. X-band frequency 9375.5 mhz. Recorded data from 1527 to 2012. I got Lutz's phone so I can monitor the radome and call the range duty officer at the Cape to check on launch status. This person will decide when we can and cannot transmit. His phone number is 853-5947
08-Jul-95 Did a solar alignment check. S band az +.1 to el +.09 X band Horizontal az +.075, el .156 set up sur scan 99. This scan will run Bob Rilling's ground clutter test. Initial tests indicate a 600 meter range discrepency between targets on the ground and what the radar is measuring. A good tower target to check your azimuth is at 261.77, range 28.8 km. We are asked to inject a test pulse into the data at 50km range and 1km width. Will continue to do this until they say otherwise. I set the attenuation on this pulse to 40 db. 40 on the hp attenuator, and zero on both the Winchells. At this setting I observed a miscalculation of the doppler value for this pulse. It changed between zero and the positive Nyquist. Later in the day when I repeated the test, the calculated doppler value was ok. Near the end of the day the UPS in the radar gave an alarm and a long and three short tones. This is the battery low indication. The UPS when on the Generac tends to cycle on and off because of the Genrac's power instability when the antenna is moving. I called Best and got the factory password and changed a couple of variables and maybe now the UPS will settle down and work right. Did an S band and X band calibration. X band tx power 50.5 dbm. Radome temperature 85 degrees F. X-band frequency 9375.75 mhz Recorded data from 1232 to 1906. Spent the rest of the day helping Mitch Randall work on the PIRAQ PC's, getting the dual stuff to run. We decided the data are ok, but were unable to get the displays working properly.
09-Jul-95 X-band data collection started late because the X-band PIRAQ is calculating Doppler with the winds reversed. To get around this I had to go to a directory on the PC called "x1band" instead of the default xband directory. This software is ok, but has a bug in it that is related to the "p" key. pressing the p key (for ppi) also spawns a gif file and binds up the pc until the gif file is done. Mitch and I will work on fixing this tomorrow when he gets back to Boulder. The New Mexico Tech guys are here and Tim is helping set up their lightning equipment. I noticed that the heathkit (our most accurate clock) was giving out the wrong time. This morning it shows the correct time, but right now it says the correct time is 3901 and the seconds are coming out in a random fashion. We may have to reconnect the gps back to this pc if this keeps up. We got a call from Mitch and he has passed the X-band Doppler fix on to Fred Fabry. We are going to take a look at this in the morning. Wilson is recording 768 gates now, and that looks ok at 64 samples, but at 1024 gates and 64 samples I think we are dropping some beams because of the look of the fanout lights. I think it's got a funny pattern to it and is dropping packets. I observed a problem with the beam data going to the reformatter. At a particular az angle, the data get a bad elevation angle tagged to this beam, and so there are gaps on the zeb display around 60 -80 degrees. The data are dropped because of this bad angle. I disconnected the qty6 connection to the X-band PC only because we are not running the new fixed software. Fabry is going to fix this tomorrow. Reconnect this pc up tomorrow. Did an S band and X band calibration. X band tx power 508 dbm. Radome temperature 100 degrees F. X-band frequency 9373.3 mhz
10-Jul-95 Mike Strong Changes to injected test pulse: 75 km and 1 km @ 40 db. This will allow the PIRAQ to have the TP in its data. The NASA Shiloh tracking site had us transmit in their direction for 30 minutes, 1500 to 1530 GMT, to test if our frequency could get into their receivers. They reported no problems.
14-Jul-95 Vinson, Rucker Wilson reports that the housekeeping variable 202, secondary transmit power is the old value of 43.1, not 51.0. I will attempt to change that tonight. I will use the program edithskp to fix this. I notice a shift in the X-band calibration curve. the power meter was replaced a few days ago with a second meter and I think that this meter is slightly different than the one originally used. I am going to put back the original meter and see if the curves go back to their original position. this second meter is showing about .5 db more tx power than the original meter. We were reading 50.5 dbm tx power, and now with this other meter we are reading 51. dbm The exabyte copy system arrived from Boulder, but it doesn't work right according to Rilling. 1024 gates at 100 meter spacing may have a problem, some beams are being dropped, probably at transitions, but the PERUSAL did not show this problem until we turned off the "if you get a bad beam I'll fix it" switch. [this, plus the "CCV fill" option.] I tried to back up the two PC's but Mitch has removed the parallel connections so I can't back them up. One is buried under the angles stuff. The other one is absent. I will have to make new cables but thats more dangerous than the normal operating stuff. I also was unable to calibrate because the X-band would not transmit in its service position. the CRDS crashed big time once when the scientists did some illegal scan type. I changed the X-band secondary tx power from 430 to 508. That's [housekeeping] word 202. I also used a program called hskped. The one called edithskp was not around. I also noticed that the printer connected to the PC keeps powering down by itself. I connected up some tape drives for Rilling, but they didn't work going to that work station. I was unable to do an X-band calibration because of a cockpit error. I ran xcal, Then I stopped the data acquisiton by typing "stop". The data acquisition stops and that, in turn, turns "on" the sector blanking and disables both transmitters. I then was unable to measure the transmit power, because the data acquisiton wasn't running, disabling the triggers. I think you have to run the X-band calibration routine on the NOVA to get the X-band transmitter to transmit. I am going to test this theory tonight, but if that's true, the procedures have to be modified to insure that the calibration routine is running prior to any transmitter power checks. After the data collection was over, and the problems with the X-band cal, we had to abandon the X-band calibration because we had some guys who wanted to practice with the touchscreen. I also replaced the power meter in the radome with the original one that Brian was using. It measures about a .5 db difference between the one that Mike was using at the +10dbm scale and I figured we should be using the power meter that Brian used to make all the initial measurements unless it just wasn't working. I think that the original meter is working ok so were going to use that one. Recorded data from 1224 to 2009
15-Jul-95 The touchscreen in the ops center is badly in need of a re-alignment. I'm going to do this after ops today. Rucker installed a radio into Tammy Weckwerth's car. The system is working better with fewer crashes today because we're collecting most of the data at 512 gates. Repaired some sondes for Tammy. I had to swap my backup exabyte tapes onto the Sun-IPC in the ops center so we could do some PIRAQ tape copying. The other pair did not appear to work. If you have trouble with exabyte drives in the radar van replace, them with the ones on the IPC next to the refrigerator. The SCSI id's should be set to 4 and 5. I did an X-band cal and the calibration routine lets you transmit, just like I thought. The instructions should be updated to reflect this little quirk. I did two X-band cals because the first one on tape didn't complete recording, but the second one did. I got plots from Rilling's workstation. I also tuned up the touch screen in the ops van. It looks brighter now and is aligned better. Turns out I changed the housekeeping in directory "scums" instead of "scumops". scumops doesn't have a link to hskped so I couldn't change it. Lutz can change it on Monday.
16-Jul-95 Rucker Question about touch screen in ops center presented by Jay: - Can a protection feature be added so that the PRF cannot be inadvertantly switched? - Can the Dual-pol mode be made to automatically change gate spacing and sampling rate to a value that would allow geometric selections to remain constant? The preferred mode for the PIRAQ's is to have the clutter filter default for "off" per Jim Wilson. He would rather have higher sensitivity than cleaner displays (less clutter). The EXAbyte tape drive in the S-band PIRAQ PC has had a few failures today. At start-up, the pc [?? some text missing!] ... operations the same thing happened. Both were resettable problems, but may be an early indication of problems to follow. The Test pulse problem of being at a positive Nyquist was back again. This time I had to increase the attenuation from 40 to 42dB in order to get a good gray (0) indication.
19-Jul-95 The blower Onan battery was discovered to be very low. I think the cell phone ran it down, but I'm not sure. I have put the other charger on it I and am doing an experiment to see if the battery is bad. I was going to put in the Pentium upgrade to the PIRAQ X-band, but the new board only has 3 isa slots. I need four. Mitch is sending a pci scsi interface and I should be able to proceed. I backed up both the PIRAQ X-band and S-band PC's to Colorado Memory Systems. Ta and Phinney are here breaking in.
20-Jul-95 Lutz is worried about getting the right time into the Nova. Chris Burghart is using our GPS to set up his machines with the right time. I gave him the GPS output because the WWV receiver was working. But then the GPS receiver broke and we are having a hard time knowing what time it is. I am experimenting with the windows clock on the PC. I set it at 14:02 on Thursday [20-Jul?] with WWV and we will see how accurate this clock is. If it's close we can use it to verify the time on the Nova. Ta is the operator today. He is going to learn how to calibrate, how to start and stop the radar and handle a few calamities that commonly occur. He will also learn how to copy all those tapes for Rilling. Ta and I copied all the tapes but the cal tape stuff would not work. Try again tomorrow. We did an X-band cal, but there was weather present in the test pulse area. We did one just for practice.
21-Jul-95 Came to the radar and saw some interesting things. DAQ running normally, but no adage display updates of beams. The beams were going out the network, however. The micro nova keeps crashing today. Three times so far. Having problems getting the correct time into the nova. I re-connected the GPS to the PC as well as the Sun workstations. Hope this works for Chris. I had the ops center touch screen lock up, but my touch screen was ok, so I just cycled power on the ops center touch screen and got it to come back. they were pressing the touch surface but were getting no action.
26-Jul-95 I have been unable to update until now. Wilson wants to change the prf to a lower value because of all the second trip echoes to the west. We selected 722.584, because its prt is divisible evenly by 8 mhz and 15 mhz. The prf is created with a 15 mhz clock, and the processor (PIRAQ) runs on 8 mhz clock. I make up a jumper for the timing module and changed the prf selector to 5 to get the timing number 5117. We first tried 5118, but it was just a little too slow. The PIRAQ prt entry in config.dsp is 11072 for this new prf. Had a tape drive on the right side quit working. Cleaned it up and it worked for a while, then quit again. Replaced it, and the next day, both drives quit working. We replaced the whole unit with the spare EXAbyte double box from next door. I think that the other two drives are still ok, but we will go with this one for now. Detected a loud noise coming from the low speed blower motor. We are keeping an eye on this. Had a radome alarm condition #1, but can't find the schematics and no one remembers what this contition is. Upgraded the X-band PIRAQ to a Pentium 90 mhz. Changed config.dsp on both PIRAQ PC's to 64 hits. Things appear to work pretty well, except the mouse on the X-band PIRAQ doesn't work. I need to reload the driver, but I can't find the floppys.
27-Jul-95 Jay Miller reports that the cloud heights are varying in stratiform clouds when you scan up and then scan down through the deck. Probably caused by RP6 beam and angle data off by one position. The X-band PIRAQ and S-band piraq do not show this symptom. When we arrived this morning, the Onan was running. The Generac had blown its breaker again, and a small hole was burned through the phenolic by the phase b connector. It worked loose and also burned up the cable going to the breaker. We had to dis-assemble the generator to get at the breaker. Had to replace a burned up wire, and rig a new connection for the b phase. I replaced the two EXAbyte drives in CP2 with the original left drive and the replaced right drive. Ran the machine for an hour and they worked ok. Backed up directory scumops to 1600 bpi tape.
28-Jul-95 The replaced drives in CP2 didn't work this morning. They didn't spin up fast enough and over ran the buffers. Replaced them with the other two. I'll try them again tonight.
END of DATA LOG, CP2 SCMS-95