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Mamoru Sekido - 28 April 2016
Yebes
Broadband system temperatures are ~ 50 K - 70 K. The warm amplifiers after the cryogenic ones and before the optical fiber converters had to be removed to avoid saturating the amplifiers used to modulate the optical laser. This increased the Tsys by a factor 2. Furthermore one of the optical channels uses an 18 dB amplifier and the other one 9 dB. This is an issue to be solved in the future.
The antenna phase cal unit has a temperature control system which has been switched off to avoid subbands in the phase cal tones.
UDCs are installed and working.UDCs 2 and 3 connected to one DBBC2
One Mark6 was installed and configured. 4 packs 32 TB each are inserted and work as a single group. There are two optical connections between the DBBC2 and the Mark6.
One RDBE-G installed and configured. The RDBE-G is also connected to the Mark6.
The second DBBC2 is used for observations with the 40m RT. usage for VGOS requires that no VLBI osbervations happen simultaneously between the 13.2m and the 40m. A DBBC3 will be ordered very soon and 3 or 4 RDBE-Gs may also be ordered soon.
Pablo de Vicente - 25 May 2016
The 13.2m antenna stopped operations (VS observations with the S/X/Ka receiver) on January 8th and is under upgrade works: the backstructure is being covered with cladding and fans are being installed in between the backstructure and the cladding. The three band receiver cryostat is going to be updated with a new head, and a new compressor compatible with the broad boand receiver is beeing installed. All these works are expected to complete in February 18th.
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