Gary Traylor, Ed Merilh, Travis Sedecki, Jeff Kissel

While At LHO last week, I was curious as to why the DRMI was taking so long to acquire under guardian control. Ed and Travis suggested this step could take up to 20 minutes sometimes. It seems that there is not enough motion of the BS to pass through a fringe for DRMI to lock.

I showed them a procedure that LLO operators may use to wiggle the BS alignment just enough to sweep a fringe that can spontaneously lock DRMI as long as all other alignments are good enough. 

From the MEDM align screen, the Yaw value for the BS can be adjusted by 0.2 using the arrow keys on the keyboard and immediately returned to its previous value at a ramp time of 1 second which will move the BS just enough to cross the fringe and when and if all of the other degrees of freedom are close, can cause a spontaneous lock. During my demonstration this worked 2 out of 3 times immediately and even though the 3rd attempt took a bit more time, I switched the slider direction to -0.2 then back to the previous value which locked immediately. Guess it needed the other edge of the fringe.

I hope this is helpful for other operators to use during quiet times for quicker lock acquisition.