Scott, Mitchell,
Today we were able to get the flexure, and locker assemblies completed for unit 3,4, and part of the 5th 3IFO BSC's. A solid amount of house cleaning was accomplished while looking for parts and hardware. At least one part so far is known to be short of needed quantities. MIT is going to look to see if they may have the shorted part. A list of M.I.A parts has been started. So far only the last unit is effected, giving us time to either find or procure parts. The bolting together of the Keel plates on unit 3 was also started today. Preparation for actuator assembly has also begun.

The control-state-definition is now operational for H1ISCEX and H1ECATX1PLC2.
New medm screens with convenient edit buttons are available form the site map (SYS-ControlStateDefinition), as well as from the ALS_CUST_MAIN.adl screen. Pictures are attached.
Some basic documentation is available at the 
   Wiki: https://awiki.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/aLIGO/Control%20State%20Definition
   DCC: https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-T1300958

Valve will be left closed for a few weeks while the portable RGA is reconfigured and then baked -> PT246A,B gauges will be measuring the "unpumped" space between the closed 10" gate valve and a closed 1 1/2" angle valve-as such ignore them until further notice.

J. Kissel

While trying grab a plot of the IMC frequency noise, I noticed that the calibration was different from what Paul had cleaned it up to be in January (see LHO aLOG 9618). I've reverted the calibration, and I attach a spectra of H1:IMC-F_OUT_DQ, compared against the requirements, found in Figure 4 of T050036. I've made no modifications to IMC-F, other than to convert kHz into Hz. The filters engaged are FMs 1,2, 3, and 9; "cts2V," "invGenFilt," "VCO," and "tokHz." Check Giacomo's original entry for details of these filters (LHO aLOG 5945).

%% EDIT %% I have corrected the attached plot, increasing the frequency noise by a factor of 10, as instructed by Alexa's comment below. Good catch!

Travis, Betsy

Last week we installed the new ITMy CP (CP05) in a new reaction chain lower structure assembly and test hung it in a double pendulum.  We made a minor coarse pitch correction, finished assembling various bits and pieces of the structure and it's other masses and then mated it to the ITMy monolithic assembly which has been waiting in the fiber welding room for a week.  Before bolting the main and reaction chains together, we pulled the FirstContact sheets from the ITMy-AR and the CP05-HR since they would be unaccessable once attached as a single unit.

We added final shielding, removed the sus structure from the LSAT tooling and stowed it in a re-cleaned storage box.  The unit will wait in the sealed box for another few weeks until it is time to move it to the beer garden.

LVEA Laser Safe

Hugo – Updating all BSC/ISI models
Thomas & Richard – Working on End-Y Op-Lev

08:45 Thomas – Going to End-X to work on Op-Lev
09:30 Hugo – Restarting all BSC/ISI Models
09:35 Betsy, Travis, & Margo – Working in SUS cleanrooms in the LVEA
09:35 Bubba & Apollo – Working on cleanroom curtains in beer garden area
09:38 Andres – Kitting 3IFO parts in HAM2 area
09:45 Praxair – Going to Mid-X to check valve repair
09:50 Justin – Working in Optics Labs
09:50 Dave – Working on TCS-X 
09:56 Hugh – HAM5 HEIP work
10:48 Cyrus – Going to End-X to work on weather station
11:05 Dave – Doing DAQ restart
12:25 Dave – Powering recycling Solaris box and restarting Frame writer #1
13:04 Justin – Working in the Optics Lab
13:30 Cyrus - Going to End-X to work on workstation
14:12 Dave & Greg – Working on TCS
14:16 Hugh – Working on HAM5 HEIP
15:04 Aaron – Installing AA chassis at End-X

I have changed the workstations at EX to run Linux instead of Mac OS.  This will allow running guardian directly (among other things), but is also very much a test.  I do not know what demons are lurking in the wireless setup, but suspect there are some, as nothing ever just works as expected on Linux, especially in this department.

The ITMY watchdogs tripped. After resetting the watchdogs, Guardian restored the remaining parts of the ISI.

Sheila switched the blends when the trilliums were still rung up.

The watchdogs on ETMX had tripped twice. Jim W. brought ETMX up via pre-Guardian scripts at the same time ops tried to recover ITMX using Guardian. This resulted in the ISI tripping a second time. Ops then started to recover the ISI using Guardian and the ISI tripped again. Ops reset the watchdogs and Guardian completed the recovery. Plots of both trips are attached below.   

at 11:09 I restarted the DAQ to suport new INI files from the ISI model changes. All came back OK except h1fw1, which now could not write any frames.

12:27 I stopped h1fw1 daqd process and unmounted the NFS export from h1ldasgw1. I then power cycled h1ldasgw1

12:46 had problems getting the file system viewable again, did a reboot of h1ldasgw1.

12:55 Finally got h1fw1 writing again, had the to the following on h1ldasgw1

# mount /cds-h1-frames

# shareall

Lets see if the reboot of the Solaris QFS server restored h1fw1 to stability.

It recently turned out that switching blends was causing glitches in the blend output to the servo loops, which were tripping the ISIs. The script handling the transition between blend filters was modified to provide a smoother ramp and prevent WD trips.

After testing at MIT, HAM and BSC master models were updated here. Every ISI on site was recompiled and restarted. The new blend switching was tested by using the blend switchall buttons* on BSC-EX. It works as expected. I was able to do the following blend switchall without tripping the ISI:

• Start->TCrappy
• TCrappy->TBetter
• Tbetter->Start (T240s rang up a bit, but they were already off the servo loops, and their WD threshold was still up from turning the ISI on earlier)

Work was performed under WP 4568, which is now closed.

*:one button to switch every blend filter of a stage a once

Note: ITMY foton file turned out to be corrupted. We only found out after restarting the model because the corrupted foton file never got loaded in the first place. Please make sure that anytime you update a Foton file, you push the Coeff load button in the GDS-TP screen. Please note that pushing the Coeff Load button from individual filter banks does not create a backup foton file, which pushing the same button from the GDS-TP sceen does.

We had a whoe lot of trips this morning, first Hugho's model restart brought things down, then we had several trips related to people working on the cleanrooms in the beergarden.  One of those is plotted below.

After the model restarts, all the guardians are in the error state.  This means that someone has to go through and set them to load, then back to exec one at a time, which is somewhat time consuming.  This also happens after a beckhoff restart.  Jeff B is going through and doing this for us now, but it is somewhat time consuming when there are three guardians for each BSC ISI model, and will probably only become more so as time goes on. 

Is there a way to make this easier/quicker?

Also, everyone who restarts frontends from now on should probably add checking that the relevant guardians are running as the last step of the process.

With a small break in commissioning, I thought it would be a good time to try to optimize the ETMX optical lever since we're really close to hitting the noise floor at low frequency (f<2Hz). Previously, we had two levels of 1:10 whitening in analog land and it was good enough for a while until we fully commissioned the ISI.  With TBetter blend settings, the suspension resonances seen in the low frequency regime are getting closer and closer to not being visible at all, which will be a problem if we want to use the optical lever for active damping.

This is the premise for changing the gain settings in order to amplify the suspension mode signals at low frequency using the whitening chassis gains we also wanted to add more laser power to match the other optical levers on site and at LLO:

Old:
2 levels of 1:10 whitening
9,000 counts on the QPD

New:
1 level of 1:10 whitening
1 level of 1.414 gain
1 level of 2.0 gain
15,000 counts on the QPD


We've also had their respective anti-whitening and anti-gain stages in software in:
H1:SUS-ETMX_L3_OPLEV_SEG1_Name2
H1:SUS-ETMX_L3_OPLEV_SEG2_Name2
H1:SUS-ETMX_L3_OPLEV_SEG3_Name2
H1:SUS-ETMX_L3_OPLEV_SEG4_Name2

I've attached the pitch, yaw, and the counts on each individual segments to show if the gain switching is working.  The REFs are the old configuration.  You can see that it really doesn't help the situation at all when it comes to the low frequency stuff which means we might have to be more clever on how to make the optical levers more useful in the future.  In fact, one could argue that Yaw got worse, but it's hard to compare since the data sets differ by about 12 hours in time.  Jeff Kissel suggested looking at the laser intensity noise as well as the electronics chain to see if that could be a limiting factor in our spectra, this means that the adding extra laser power could be the cause of the increase in noise floor.

I have changed the X11 driver on opsws4 and 7 to use the proprietary AMD version; this matches the configuration of the other workstations.  These were originally kept on the open source driver due to problems using RDP with the other driver, at the expense of MEDM running slow - switching to rdesktop instead of remmina for RDP seems to have fixed this.

model restarts logged for Wed 16/Apr/2014
2014_04_16 03:22 h1fw1
2014_04_16 05:30 h1fw1
2014_04_16 06:08 h1fw1
2014_04_16 06:26 h1fw1
2014_04_16 09:16 h1fw1
2014_04_16 11:22 h1fw1
2014_04_16 18:23 h1fw1
2014_04_16 21:18 h1fw1
2014_04_16 23:13 h1fw1
2014_04_16 23:25 h1fw1

all restarts of h1fw1 are unexpected. We might try a reboot of the solaris QFS server h1ldasgateway1 today if this persists.

h1nds1 (the default NDS) reads frames written by h1fw1. This will show data gaps when h1fw1 restarts. If this poses a problem, the user has the option to switch to h1nds0 which has continguous data.

(Alexa, Daniel)

We added an FDD in the IMC VCO path (currently borrowed the ALS DIFF FDD). In doing so,  we have reduced the signal by a factor of 10. We adjusted the MC common mode board fast gain to 14dB from the original -6dB. The MCL-MCF Crossover is still the same (UGF: 14.7Hz w/ 39 deg phase margin). I have attached a DTT plot with the current crossover and a reference taken on 03-17-2014. We have also adjusted the gain in the IMC_F filter to be 0.1 to account for the reduced VCO DC gain. We remeasured the IMC_F noise as done in alog 5311; the results are suffeciently consistent (see second DTT image; DTT is saved uner my public directory). Finally, we measured the IMC OLTF; the UGF is 31kHz with a phase margin of 38deg (close enough to the nominal UGF: 53kHz, 45 deg phase margin). The data and plot are attached. 

I have placed an IFR below the 79Mhz RF source on the ISC C4 Rack. The IFR is set to 78.95MHz with an RF level of 10dBm and is now used instead of the RF source.

We are waiting for the x-arm to test if the 1/f noise has actually decreased with these changes...TBD.