TITLE: 01/11 Day Shift: 16:00-00:00 UTC (08:00-16:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Lock Acquisition
OUTGOING OPERATOR: None
CURRENT ENVIRONMENT:
    Wind: 15mph Gusts, 11mph 5min avg
    Primary useism: 0.05 μm/s
    Secondary useism: 0.27 μm/s 
QUICK SUMMARY:
Richard M. was attempting to lock ALS when I arrived. Aligned the ETM mirrors and then the BS in CHECK_MICH_FRINGES. Attempting to lock PRMI. May move to initial alignment. John is clearing snow by CP1 (WP 6429).

TITLE: 01/11 Eve Shift: 00:00-08:00 UTC (16:00-00:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Observing at 60.9258Mpc
INCOMING OPERATOR: Jim may or may not decide to venture in (I have been in contact with him this evening)
SHIFT SUMMARY:
H1 has been in OBSERVING for almost 6hrs at a fairly steady 60Mpc.

Continue to experience non-normal winter weather with forecast for possibly more snow overnight & freezing temperatures.  Have also had fairly blizzard like conditions with winds just below 20mph.  Have been in contact with OWL shift operator with regards to coverage & they will do what feels safe.  

I am leaving NOW to brave roads home & so H1 will be flying on automatic pilot for a few hours or until the morning. 

I have talked with William Parker (LLO operator) and aprised him of our situation.

LOG:

DIAG_MAIN message:   PCAL:  Y RX PD is 0.01 OFF

• Last person other than me....at 4:30pm (0:28utc)
• H1 has been UNDISTURBED since 22:43utc
• 0:34-1:34 GRB Stand Down Time
• 2:14 PI Mode 27 quickly rang up.  Sign change damped it.
• 2:33 TCSy Chiller LOW flow (no action taken)

TITLE: 01/11 Eve Shift: 00:00-08:00 UTC (16:00-00:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Observing at 59.2008Mpc
OUTGOING OPERATOR: Travis (handoff over phone & thumbs up on road) & TJ who gave me a verbal handoff in hallway
CURRENT ENVIRONMENT:
    Wind: 18mph Gusts, 15mph 5min avg
    Primary useism: 0.09 μm/s
    Secondary useism: 0.27 μm/s

Hanford Site issued an early DAY shift ending at 12:45pmPST.  Drive in was snowy & not terrible, but Route10's inbound lane (which I was a sole occupier of) was not plowed much & had some drifts of a 1' which caused me to throttle it down to 40mph (mostly less than that).  Also saw one sad stranded BIG 4x4 truck on the side of the road on SR240 (which I was on from Twin Bridges to Route 10).  It probably only took me 30-40min to come in on my usual 25min route (but this included me stopping to take some photos).

Winds look to be picking up and are hitting 20mph (more so on the Y-arm).

QUICK SUMMARY:
As I entered the building TJ, Kissel, & Dick were leaving.  There was mention of pesky PI Modes, but other than that, I was handed an OBSERVING H1 with a range hovering around 60Mpc.  We had just completed (at 0:14utc) the STAND DOWN time for a GRB at the end of the last shift.

I will carry on with the shift, but I am hesitant about the whole shift and will issue an email to Warner about our wintry conditions for his OWL shift.

Just before submitting this alog: 

• 0:34utc GRB via Swift
• Stand down until 1:34utc
• Contacted Jeremy and they were also aware.

TITLE: 01/10 Day Shift: 16:00-00:00 UTC (08:00-16:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Observing at 58.2484Mpc
INCOMING OPERATOR: Corey
SHIFT SUMMARY:  A bit of a rough IA after Maintenance Day, but after pushing through that, we have had no real issues (other than weather).
LOG:

17:03 Karen to LVEA

17:12 Peter done is PSL

17:57 Kyle to BSC8

17:59 JeffK starting charge measurements

18:11 TCSy chiller controller swap

18:44 TCSy chiller back on

19:04 Charge meas. done

19:29 Kyle out

19:43 Bubba to LVEA to check 3IFO storage

19:58 Bubba out

20:02 Karen out

Note:  Bubba has been plowing snow around the corner station with a new LARGE front end loader since ~23:00UTC.
 

TCS_ITMX_CO2 guardian node kicked us out of Observe, then fixed itself. 

Update: Early Release due to Adverse Weather Conditions (Staggered Release)

									Station# 12  (WYEB) at 550 ft above MSL     

 Time: 15:30:00 PST      Date: 1/10/2017

 Ave Wind Direction = 316
 Ave Wind Speed     =  15
 Max Wind Speed     =  21
                         Celsius
 Ave Temp = 25.9          -3.42
 Max Temp = 26.0          -3.31
 Min Temp = 25.4          -3.64

 Wind Chill  =  13.8

 Rain Gauge = 0.00

GRB alert at 23:13 UTC.  Begin 1 hour standdown.

After Maintenance Day ended at noon, we struggled for a bit to recover arm alignment to get past ALS locking.  Although the stability of the green arm locking was a bit questionable, JeffK, Jenne, and I decided to move on through IA.  After completing IA, we have finally made it to NLN as of 22:35 UTC.

Suspect Y2-8 ion pump is not working properly. There was a pressure rise in Y-arm on Saturday, Jan. 7th at around 11:30 am local time. Attached is y-arm pressure trends. Purple curve for PT427, located at Y2-8 (250 m down from EY), shows the sharpest increase. We will investigate the controller located in EY mech. room after snow is cleared. Bubba and John couldn't get past warehouse today in truck.

References on faulty HV cable:

aLOG 28857

aLOG 28847

aLOG 28818

IP5 controller (corner station) failed 6.5 hrs prior on Jan. 7th coincidentally.

I went through the checklist and didn't find anything too out of place or worrysome. The two things that I thought worth mentioning are:

• The double doors to the East of the PSL enclosure do not seem to close all the way. I didn't want to put too much force into it, but it barely wouldn't catch.
• In the North Bay along the East wall there are a some double doors left open with some cables that are passed between the door and the door frame so it cannot close. Within these doors there is an open electrical box with some wires hanging out, and on the floor leaned up against the wall is a rack computer that is running. This seems like something that is a WIP but after I asked Fil he said it has been that way for a very long time. Attached picture.

J. Kissel

Your weekly charge measurement update from H1: ETMX and ETMY ESD systems are showing little-to-no effective bias voltage from accumulated charge. 

Recall we're flipping the bias voltage whenever the given test mass is not in use (i.e. ETMY flipped when DOWN [since 2016 Nov 28, see LHO aLOG 31929], and ETMX flipped when in nominal low noise [since 2016 Nov 03, see LHO aLOG 31172]). Since the regular flipping began, and our duty cycle has been consistently around 50%, we're keeping all quadrants below +/-10 [V] effective bias voltage, which is a small fraction of the requested bias voltage (~400 [V]), which means the actuation strength is changing at the sub-percent level, and is consistent with the uncertainty of the measurement.

We should confirm this by comparing against longitudinal actuation strength, a. la. LHO aLOG 24241.

WP 6428

This morning the CO2 Laser Interlock Chassis D1200745 was replaced. This work is part of the ongoing investigation of the TCS flow sensor alarms/glitches. See alog 32776. Verified trip point for the temperature shutoff of the laser on new chassis. Steps taken to replace chassis:

1. Turn off laser at key
2. Turn off chiller in mechanical room
3. Turn off chassis and unplug all connections
4. Install new chassis, rocker switch set to CW (OPS) position
5. Redo connections to chassis & power on
6. Turn on chiller
7. Check there are no red lights on chassis front panel
8. Key on laser and press gate button
9. Check laser power actually powers on (MEDM screen).

Old Chassis S1302125
New Chassis S1302122

Fil, Richard, Nutsinee, Alastair

FAMIS#4709

I couldnt get the data via the script so I had to get second trends "by hand" in dataviewer. Barbaric.

ETMY Pit is at -12

ETMY Yaw is at -8

ETMX Pit is approaching -10

Krishna

I have modified the C# code in BRS Beckhoff computers used for the angle readout. The code is used to fit the cross-correlation of the patterns in the CCD to infer the position change (=angle) of the patterns. The code used to have a manually adjusted fit parameter. This was unsatisfactory and produced errors in the fit as the beam-balance position changed over time or it's amplitude grew. The noise level in the angle would vary from ~0.2 nrad/rt(Hz) to ~0.4 nrad/rt(Hz). We came up with a better routine than can extract this parameter from the data and use it to correct the fit producing superior results as shown in the attachment. The noise level should now stay below 0.2 nrad/rt(Hz).

The code for both BRS' has been updated.

This should allow us to set higher thresholds for BRSX damper, which will help with the problem in 33028. However, it would still be a good idea for the operator or anyone else to keep the BRSX amplitude small by damping it, whenever we are not observing.

Other updates

I cleared the encoder_value_save.txt file for BRSX, by deleting all characters inside. I suspect the large number of ascii values there were caused by interruption of the ethercat communication to the Beckhoff Motor Controller, likely due to lose wires. The evidence for this is the two drops in the BRSX_BOXBIT in November. It hasn't happened since, but it would be good to investigate it when convenient. After clearing the file, I restarted the computer, restarted the PLC and zeroed the encoder position. After modifying the C# code and restarting it, the damper seemed fine. We'll keep an eye on this.

For BRSY, I noticed a couple of problems with the Diagnostic C# code, which we use when we have to change the centering of the beam-balance. First was that Visual Studio asked me to log in with a Microsoft account id. I created a new one, since I couldn't remember what the old one was. This info will be added to the BRS troubleshooting guide on the DCC to prevent this problem in the future. Second, the C# code would freeze after 11 seconds for no obvious reason. I restarted the Beckhoff computer, after which it worked fine. I wanted to make a note of this here to prevent future surprises.

After consulting with John W. and Bubba G., Jim W. and I decided to postpone the spare seismometer test at BRSY due to the poor road conditions. I'll leave the table with Jim and he will install it at the next available opportunity