TITLE: 12/03 Owl Shift: 08:00-16:00 UTC (00:00-08:00 PST), all times posted in UTC

STATE of H1: Observing at 69.8653Mpc

INCOMING OPERATOR: Patrick

SHIFT SUMMARY: Lockloss as I tried to switch the ISI config to prepare for a "big" earthquake as reported by Terramon (6.0M in Alaska). Turned out Terramon predicted R-wave amplitude wrong by a factor of 7 and this ISI config change didn't have to be done. Most of the struggles were due to sudden drop of AS90/POP90 after DRMI ASC was engaged (it wasn't obvious to me at the time since the drop happened further down the path, mostly at DRMI_LOCKED). As I started an initial alignment I went through Jenne's troublehoot document that reminds me I should have looked at the error signals. After the initial alignment was done I went back to locking DRMI and zeroed the SRC1 and SRC2 error signals by moving SRM and SR2. I had to walk both SRM and SR2 to zero the error signal. The rest of the locking sequence went fine. 500-510Hz violin modes came back high and saturated the OMC DC PD so I sat at DC_READOUT and wait until the modes are somewhat damped. All the ISI ST2 configs are still BLEND_250_SC_A as Ed had them.

09:53 UTC Seeing that Terramon predicted 6.7 um/s I hurried and swithed SEI config to EARTH_QUAKE_V2 as the earthquake arrvied on the FOM. However, that was before I realized that what I saw was already the peak at ~1um/s and it was already turning back down. We could have ridden through this earthquake. Livingston is also down.

04:46 EY saturation

07:45 EY saturation

• H1 locked at NLN/Observing
• All BSC are set to BLEND_250_SC_A
• EQ bands up around .07um/s. uSei is 1+um/s and holding steady for the last 6 hours or so.
• Winds are around 15-20mph gusting to 30+ at times
• LVEA dust monitors 6&10 and both PSL dust monitors have been sending alarms

• Trying Sei configurations stated in WP#6369
• 00:35UTC Since both IFOs were out of lock and µseism is at or above 1µm/s, Corey and I placed a phone call to Jim inquiring about trying the new sei configuration to see if it made any improvements as monitored in the Tidal StripTool. All BSC configs were switched from BLEND_250_SC_B to BLEND_250_SC_A. Tidal seemed to improve slightly as can be seen to the right hand side of the attached tidal image (the noisy bit in the middle can be ignored as it was irrelevant to the situation). These changes were made around the DRMI_LOCKED Guardian stage of locking. After some requisite BS aligning, the locked progressed to SWITCH_TO_QPDS and broke there. This is not an uncommon place for a lock to fail in my experience. Subsequent attempts at locking would end at FIND_IR with the guardian message "x-arm alignment bad not searching". 

01:06UTC I reverted back to the original sei configuration for BSCs and locking attempts continue.

01:34UTC multiple locklosses at FIND_IR. Reverting back to new configs just to see if I can get past this stage.

01:50UTC New sei configs got me into DRMI land. MICH alignment looks pretty terrible. Trending witness sensors not revealing much. Going to try some alignment with INITIAL_ALIGNMENT guardian. Not going to do the arms if I can help it.

02:00UTC INITIAL_ALIGNMENT/INPUT_ALIGN not working. After trying to adjust the gain higher to get a lock I decided to trend(TimeMachine)IM4. I found it to be about 100urads out in pit. This seems to have corrected the issue. Perhaps this less-than-optimal pointing has been the sore spot in my locking efforts? Also had to put SR2 back to center before aligning SRC.

04:00UTC H1 Locked, Observing Range is ~72Mpc. Lock stretch so far: 01:08 coincidental with L1.

02:51UTC - NLN 75.3Mpc

Keita is working on some ALS diffs that were knocking the intent bit loose. I firmed up some channels to be unmonitored for some BS gain settings with the assistance of Jim W ( by telephone) so that I could set the intent bit.

TITLE: 12/02 Day Shift: 16:00-00:00 UTC (08:00-16:00 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Observing at 73.9893Mpc
INCOMING OPERATOR: Ed
SHIFT SUMMARY:

Locked for a good chunk of the shift, but useism & wind grew pretty noisy in the afternoon....to a point where locking was going to be tough.

LOG:

• Elevated Dust Levels in Southbay & inside PSL Room from OWL shift & continued throughout the day.
• 16:36:  Xmid Cleaning
• 20:16 Out of Observing
  • A2L Run & testing of new A2L interface (JimW & Jenne)
  • High-freq Cal Line change (Evan)
• 20:28 OBSERVING
  • 20:51 Lockloss!
  • ASC ERROR Pitch increased, Wind gusted up to 16mph, useism is hovering around 0.7um/s
• Alfredo & Elizabeth at MidY
• 21:44 OBSERVING
  • BS & PRM were way off, so during locking tweaked BS alot in MICH Fringes, & PRM with unlocked PRMI (under Sheila's watchful eye).  Then PRMI finally locked!
  • 22:56 "TCSY chiller flow is low" alarm.  Looked at trend, notified Jason, and he went to Chiller.  He thinks it's a Chiller issue & swapping this out is on their Maintenance To Do list.
  • 23:13 GRB Alarm
  • 23:21 Knocked out of Commissioning by SDF Diff from EX Beckhoff computer. (not clear what channels caused it yet).
  • 23:56 Lockloss (due to high useism & winds).

At 23:13 we received a "Gamma Ray Burst" Alarm.

Following L1500117:

• Step 1:  Checked to see if this is a TEST  
  • What does this mean?  Do Tests have the "INJ" flags?  Are there any other types of flags for Tests?
  • On GraceDB, there was a little confusion.  We could see a (1) GRB Report (EM_COINC) from Swift, but (2) around the same time, there were also some INJ EM_COINC's from CWB (!).  The GRB's event time was over 2min after the EM_COINC's.  
  • So was NOT a TEST
• Step 2:  Stand Down Time from 23:13 - 0:13utc
• Step 3:  Finally talked with LLO.  They did not know about the GRB, so they went to go check. Heard them say they DID NOT receive audible alarm, but had "text notification".

THEN:

AT 23:21 We were bumped out of OBSERVING!!  (Sheila noticed it, we didn't hear it for some reason during all the hub bub of figuring out the deluge of GraceDB reports.)  It wasn't obvious why we were bumped out of OBSERVING.  But since we tend to get bumped out due to SDF Diffs/changes, JimW looked at the DIAG_SDF node's log.  On here he noticed we were getting DIFFS for the SDF NODE:  sysecatx1plc2

Unfortunately, when the diffs appeared they only happened for a few seconds (knocked us out of OBSERVING), and then go away.  So it was hard to see what channels were in question.  It happened several times, and managed to catch a glance at the channels in question.  Words we saw in the channel were:  ALS, Fiber, polarization.  Since they deal with the ALS, we can probably safely say we can NOT_MONITOR these channels (but we should get a blessing from Keita).  Or if we are in a fix in the middle of the night, and you are able to figure out who these elusive channels are, be sure to note the channels, NOT_MONITOR them for the night and then alog what you did.

Epilogue:

We ended up losing lock at 23:56--it's really noisy seismically with useism & wind.

4:20pm local

Took 22 min. to overfill CP3 by raising LLCV to 50% open from control room. I raised nominal value from 16% to 17% for weekend.

Jenne, Jim W, Dave:

In order to run the a2l_min_LHO.py script from an MEDM shell launcher, I had to explicitly define full paths for all files used. Jenne created a testWrite.py which I used to test this out.

The MEDM command block in the A2L_screen.adl file (callable from SITEMAP via the SUS pulldown) is

        command[0] {
                label="A2L Script"
                name="xterm"
                args="-hold -e 'cd /opt/rtcds/userapps/trunk/isc/common/scripts/decoup; /usr/bin/python /opt/rtcds/userapps/trunk/isc/common/scripts/decoup/a2l_min_LHO.py'"
        }