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Those present at the LNGS:
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Kate, Chris W., Maurizio, Paolo, Stefano, Sophia, Kael, Erik
Recent departures:
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Ed Kearns, Chris O., Colin
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MACRO, it seems is now running in monopole mode. Several weeks
ago, the detector was brought down to exhume scores of PMTs and
bases that were not up to snuff for small signal analysis. The
grisly work, undertaken primarily by our resident tank end sexton
Stefano Stalio, has unfortunately interrupted full-SM operation
for many runs during this period, however, we are pleased to
notify all that the scintillator system(1) is ready to go. In
total, Stefano says that about 5% of the horizontal PMTs were
replaced.
With the detector down in various segments the WFD crew of
the Chris, Chris, and Ed have been whipping the waveforms into
shape. It is noteworthy that the vast majority of WFD problems
have not arisen in the course of their operation but were there
from the start so we can expect that these systems will be very
stable after they reach initial stability. Last week new
waveform boards were installed and calibrated where there had
been problems. In addition, spot checks were done on working
cards to verify the calibrations done when they were put in
earlier this year. This week Chris Walter is giving the LIP
trigger units "new brains", i.e., new EEPROMs, to fix a problem
with inter-SM LIP events.
Kate has been working on the ERP LUTs with her programme
nouveaux of trigger table generation. Her scheme has been to
map the ERP FADC (determines trigger) <--> ERP ADC for every
tank and then use normal ADC data backwards-mapped to see the
hit density in terms of the LUT. In this manner she has gained
a deep understanding of what's been going on, even for those
tanks that have historically exhibited pathological behaviour.
Kate has also been investigating ERPGC / PHRASE correlations
and has found that there are many events that ERPGC and PHRASE
do not share. She made special runs with the waveforms to find
that the ERP, at GC level, is often confused by radioactive
pre-pulses, and so, produces fake triggers. These are all
recognizable as fake when the hit position is reconstructed:
the ADC-z and TDC-z do not agree.
BMON has been floundering of late. Maurizio is looking into
the cause but has only found the situation to make less sense
the further he goes. The jobs are being executed at the end
of each data run but something has happened to cause BMON to
choke on the output it produces. As a consequence, its
mailings are very sparse. Erik has set up a detailed run
summary that is available for perusal by the shiftworkers, as
well as a host of automatic mailers, the MACRO SPIRITS, however,
BMON serves well for pinpointing ERP problems so Maurizio
is pressing onward.
Sophia has remedied the ails of SM 3's TOHM attico unit by
adding a heatsink to a chip in the clock distribution. Without
this heatsink, the chip overheated and caused TOHM failure.
She has also replaced bad cards in SMs 1 and 5. There are
several left to replace but they must be checked first.
Your narrator has mostly been up to no good, but among his
less malefic deeds are those concerning debugging of the
calibration hardware. The reference ADC on microvax 2 has
been reading back a large pedestal which was traced back to
an abnormally large gate signal. This gate must be shortened
and resynchronized. Also, he and Maurizio replaced a fanout
with a broken op-amp which was bungling timewalk calibrations
on microvax 1.
Shiftreporter: Kael Hanson
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