POX11 (see this entry) is now listed as REFL11 (on the very top row).

We will rename POY11 to POP11 for DRMI locking.

The files are on https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/svn/trunk/suresh/40m_RF_upgrade/.

Figure.1  I-Q relative phase measurement as a function of LO power.

 Blue curve : relative phase of AS55 that I have modified today (#4572).

 Red curve : relative phase of AS11 that I had modified a week ago (#4554). Just for comparison.

 The relative phase of AS55 agrees approximately what we expected according to the datasheet of PSCQ-2-51W. We expected 85 degree.

Figure.1  I-Q amplitude imbalance as a function of LO power.

From - 5 dBm to 5 dBm in LO power the imbalance is within 3 %.

But the precision of the measurement is also about 2 % (because I used an oscilloscope). Even so the imbalance is still good.

A new 90 deg splitter, PSCQ-2-51W, has been installed on another demod board called AS55.

It shows a reasonably close 90 degree separation between the I and Q signals at 55 MHz with various LO and RF power.

So far we have ordered only three PSCQ-2-51Ws for test. Now we will order some more for the other demodulators.

 Some plots will be posted later.

 with script

While checking whitening filters on the LSC rack, I found some epics controls for the whitening looked not working.

So I powered two crates off : the top one and the bottom one on 1Y3 rack.

These crates contain c1iscaux and c1iscaux2. Then powered them on. But it didn't solve the issue.

I used the Jenne AM laser to tune up the PD (used to be POX_11 but now is called REFL_11). In addition to the notch at 22 MHz, I have also put in a LC notch at 5*f = 55.3 MHz. The transfer function below shows the RF OUT of the PD v. the drive to the laser. I didn't divide out by the 1811 because its not on the EE bench.

The performance plots for POX_11 in the wiki are horrendous and the schematic is missing.

I opened up the box and found all kinds of horrors. There were multiple tunable parts and a flurry of excess nonsense.

The top 2 worst offenders:

1) The main tunable inductor was busted. I removed it and found that the coil was open. Too much indelicate soldering in its vicinity had melted the wire. Someone had put extra inductors and capacitors around it to make it seem as if the PD was working fine, but the noise performance was off by a factor of ~100.

2) The MAX4107 had a 1.4k series resistor. This make the output go through a 1450/50 voltage division which is not nice for the SNR. I removed it.

I then struggled for awhile to get a sensible response. It turned out that the TEST IN input was not giving me a sensible TF. Jenne and I fired the Jenne laser at it and found that the 11 MHz main resonance is there. In the morning I'll finish this off and post more results. I think its going to end up being fine.

We are going to have to take a careful look at all the RFPDs if this one is any indication...

 Thanks Jamie, I've updated the links from the ATF wiki to reflect this.

 Nope.  I know I had the right address, and it was down for me too all weekend.  It's better now though.  blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu was up though.

 There was an email from Dave Barker about this.  They had to reorganize the DNS at LHO.  The URL that should be used is: http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m

40m wiki seems to have been down for quite a while now but I can't see any info in the elog about it.  Is there some ongoing problem?

To design a new resonant EOM box I started reviewing the prototype that I've built.

As a part of reviewing I checked an important thing that I haven't carefully done so far :

I compared the measured input impedance with that of predicted from a circuit model. I found that they show a good agreement.

So I am now confident that we can predict / design a new circuit performance.

* * * (input impedance) * * *

 Performance of a resonant circuit is close related to its input impedance and hence, in other words, determined by the input impedance.

Therefore an investigation of input impedance is a way to check the performance of a circuit. That's why I always use impedance for checking the circuit.

The plot below is a comparison of input impedance for the measured one and one predicted from a model. They show a good agreement.

(Note that the input impedance is supposed to have 50 Ohm peaks at 11, 29.5 and 55 MHz.)

 
* * * (circuit model) * * *

To make the things simpler I assume the following three conditions in my model:

 1. inductor's loss is dominated by its DC resistance (DCR)

 2. capacitor's loss is characterized only by Q-value

 3. Transformer's loss is dominated by DCR and its leakage inductance

All the parameters are quoted from either datasheet or my measurement. The model I am using is depicted in the schematic below.

Basically the Q-vaules for the capacitors that I used are quite low. I think higher Q capacitors will improve the performance and bring them to more 50 Ohm.

Problem:

Way back, Jay had D-sub to SCSI adapters made to adapt our existing Sander box AA filters to the new SCSI based IO chassis.  However, these did not fit inside the box.

At the time, we simply left the cards outside hanging, which was a hack and needed to be replaced.

Solution:

Steve modified a black AA filter box so that it could fit the D-sub to SCSI adapter board on it, plus strain relief the SCSI cable, rather than let it hang.  The back of the box was cut, and an extending piece of metal attached to the bottom of the box.  The adapter board was screwed into the box, the SCSI plugged in, then the SCSI cable is clamped to the extending metal as well.

This modification will be propagated to the 3 remaining AA filter boards using the D-sub to SCSI adapter.

Amplitude imbalance between I and Q in a demod board, AS11, with the new 90 deg splitter was measured.

It shows roughly 10% amplitude imbalance when the LO power is in a range from 0 to 5 dBm. Not so bad.

  With the handmade coil there used to be a huge imbalance (either I or Q goes to zero volt while the other keeps about 1 V rms) as the LO power decreases.

But with the new 90 deg splitter now there are no more such a huge imbalance.

The remaining 10 % imbalance possibly comes from the fact that we are using ERA-5 in each I and Q path. They may have such gain imbalance of 10%.

We should check the ERA-5 gains so that we can confidently say ERA-5 causes the amplitude imbalance.

Then our plan replacing the ERA-5s (see here) will sound more reasonable.

RF Amp operating temperature

Earlier measurement reported by Alberto in LIGO-T10004-61-v1 based on the LM34 temperature sensor were lower than that shown by placing a calibrated thermocouple sensor directly on the heat sink by about 5deg C. The difference probably arose because the LM34 was located on a separate free-hanging copper sheet attached to the RF Amp by a single screw, resulting in a gradient across the copper strip.   I tried to move the LM34 which was glued down, but broke the leads in the process.  I then replaced it with another one mounted much closer to the heat sink and held it down with a copper-strip clamp.  There is no glue involved and there is heatsink compound between the flat surface of the LM34 and the heatsink.  Picture attached. 

  The picture also shows the new filters which have been put in place to reduce the harmonics.  Note that the SBP-10.7 which was to go on the 11 MHz Demod output is located much farther upsteam due to space constraints.

As seen in the previous measurement the first harmonic of both the 11 MHz and 55 MHz outputs are about 30dB
higher than desired.  In an attempt to attenuate these and higher harmonics I introduced SBP-10.7 filters into
the 11MHz outputs and SLP-50 filters into the 55 MHz outputs.
Then I measured the height of the harmonics again and found that they were suppressed as expected.  Now harmonic
at 22 MHz is 58dB lower than the 11 MHz fundamental.  And the 110 MHz is lower by 55 dB compared to the 55 MHz
fundamental.  None of the higher harmonics are seen => they are below 70dB

SLP-50 has an insertion loss(IL) of 4.65 dB and Return Loss(RL) of 3dB.  It would be better to use SBP-60
(IL=1.4 dB and RL=23dB)

The filter on the 11 MHz lines is okay. The SBP-10.7 has IL=0.6 dB and RL=23 dB.

Restarted the elog with the script.

A less LO power dependence on the relative phase was found. The new 90 deg splitter works better.

From -3 dBm to 10 dBm in LO power, the relative phase is within 90 +/- 5 deg.

As a comparison I plot the phase that I measured when the handmade coil had been there (green curve in the plot).

 I will also measure amplitude unbalances between I and Q.

A new 90 degree splitter, PSCQ-2-51W, has arrived today and I installed it on a demod board called AS11.

Results of the I-Q phase measurement with the new splitter will be reported soon.

 * Picture 1 = before removal of the handmade coil

 * Picture 2 = after removal of the coil and the associated capacitors

 * Picture 3 = after soldering PSCQ-2-51-W

 The installation went smoothly. There will be no more banging the doors into  guides on the east side.

Atm2 showing the west side as is today

The anti aliasing box was opened up at the back to accommodate the junction board and the SCSI cable towards the ADC. Aluminum plate was attached to the bottom to hold the strain relief clamp.

Three more hanging junction cards will be replaced in this manner.

New right angle PVC, 2 x 2 x  1/4" installed at the AP table to strain relief the 1/4" spiral corrugated RF coaxes.

The east side window guides  will be replaced by one long U-channel. There will be drilling into 2x2 steel frame. It should be done by 2pm today

This should remove the jerking motion of windows hitting the individual guides.

This is an overview of how I got (almost) all the CDS tools running on pianosa, the new Ubuntu 10.04 control room work station.

This is machine is experiment in minimizing the amount of custom configuration and source code compiling. I am attempting to install as many tools as possible from existing packages in

available packages

I was able to install a number of packages directly from the ubuntu archives, including fftw, grace, and ROOT:

apt-get install \
 libfftw3-dev \
 grace \
 root-system

LSCSOFT

I installed all needed LSCSOFT packages (framecpp, libframe, metaio) from the well-maintained UWM LSCSOFT repository.

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/lscsoft.list
deb http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/daswg/download/software/debian/ squeeze
deb-src http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/daswg/download/software/debian/ squeeze contrib

sudo apt-get install lscsoft-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ldas-tools-framecpp-dev libframe-dev libmetaio-dev lscsoft-user-en

You then need to source /opt/lscsoft/lscsoft-user-env.sh to use these packages.

EPICS

There actually appear to be a couple of projects that are trying to provide debs of EPICS. I was able to actually get epics working from one of them, but it didn't include some of the other needed packages (such as MEDM and BURT) so I fell back to using Keith's pre-build binary tarball.

Prereqs:

apt-get install \
 libmotif-dev \
 libxt-dev \
 libxmu-dev \
 libxprintutil-dev \
 libxpm-dev \
 libz-dev \
 libxaw7-dev \
 libpng-dev \
 libgd2-xpm-dev \
 libbz2-dev \
 libssl-dev \
 liblapack-dev \
 gfortran

Pulled Keith's prebuild binary:

cd /ligo/apps
 wget https://llocds.ligo-la.caltech.edu/daq/software/binary/apps/ubuntu/epics-3.14.10-ubuntu.tar.gz
 tar zxf epics-3.14.10-ubuntu.tar.gz

GDS

I built GDS from svn, after I fixed some broken stuff [0]:

cd ~controls/src/gds
svn co https://redoubt.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/svn/gds/trunk
cd trunk
#fixed broken stuff [0]
source /opt/lscsoft/lscsoft-user-env.sh
./bootstrap
export GDSBUILD=online
export ROOTSYS=/usr
./configure --prefix=/ligo/apps/gds --enable-only-dtt --with-epics=/ligo/apps/epics-3.14.10
make
make install

dataviewer

I installed dataviewer from source:

cd ~controls/src/advLigoRTS
svn co https://redoubt.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/svn/advLigoRTS/trunk
cd trunk/src/dv
#fix stupid makefile /opt/rtapps --> /ligo/apps
make
make install

I found that the actual dataviewer wrapper script was also broken, so I made a new one:

$ cat /ligo/apps/dv/dataviewer
#!/bin/bash
export DVPATH=/ligo/apps/dv
ID=$$
DCDIR=/tmp/${ID}DC
mkdir $DCDIR
trap "rm -rf $DCDIR" EXIT
$DVPATH/dc3 -s ${NDSSERVER} -a $ID -b $DVPATH "$@"

environment

Finally, I made a environment definer file:

$ cat /ligo/apps/cds-user-env.sh
# source the lscsoft environment
. /opt/lscsoft/lscsoft-user-env.sh

# source the gds environment
. /ligo/apps/gds/etc/gds-user-env.sh

# special local epics setup
EPICS=/ligo/apps/epics
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${EPICS}/base/lib/linux-x86_64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${EPICS}/extensions/lib/linux-x86_64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${EPICS}/modules/seq/lib/linux-x86_64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=${EPICS}/base/bin/linux-x86_64:$PATH
export PATH=${EPICS}/extensions/bin/linux-x86_64:$PATH
export PATH=${EPICS}/modules/seq/bin/linux-x86_64:$PATH

# dataviewer path
export PATH=/ligo/apps/dv:${PATH}

# specify the NDS server
export NDSSERVER=fb 

[0] GDS was not compiling, because of what looked like bugs. I'm not sure why I'm the first person to catch these things. Stricter compiler?

To fix the following compile error:

TLGExport.cc:1337: error: ‘atoi’ was not declared in this scope

I made the following patch:

Index: /home/controls/src/gds/trunk/GUI/dttview/TLGExport.cc
===================================================================
--- /home/controls/src/gds/trunk/GUI/dttview/TLGExport.cc	(revision 6423)
+++ /home/controls/src/gds/trunk/GUI/dttview/TLGExport.cc	(working copy)
@@ -31,6 +31,7 @@
 #include <iomanip>
 #include <string.h>
 #include <strings.h>
+#include <stdlib.h>
 
 namespace ligogui {
    using namespace std;

To fix the following compile error:

TLGPrint.cc:264: error: call of overloaded ‘abs(Int_t&)’ is ambiguous

I made the following patch:

Index: /home/controls/src/gds/trunk/GUI/dttview/TLGPrint.cc
===================================================================
--- /home/controls/src/gds/trunk/GUI/dttview/TLGPrint.cc	(revision 6423)
+++ /home/controls/src/gds/trunk/GUI/dttview/TLGPrint.cc	(working copy)
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
 #include <fstream>
 #include <map>

The suggested layout of the 1Y2 Rack is shown below.

To simplify the wiring, I have largely kept demod boards with the same same LO frequency close to each other. 

The Heliax cables land on the top and bottom of the of subracks.  These are currently flexible plastic sheets.  Steve has agreed to replace them with something more rigid.  It would be good to have eight N-type connectors on the top and eight  at the bottom.  As  demod boards occur in sets of eight per subrack.  So it would be convenient if the 11 and 55 Mhz Heliax cables land on the top and the rest at the bottom.  In the layout I have shown the current situation. 

The LO signals to the boards come from the RF Distribution box and this is kept in the middle so that cables to both the subracks can be kept short.

The outputs of the AA filter boards from both subracks  have to be connected to the SCSI Interface board with a twisted pair ribbon cable. 

We found a stray unused heliax cable running from the LSC rack 1Y2 to a point between the cabinets 1X3 and 1X4. This cable will need to be redirected to the AS table in the new scheme.   It is labled C1LSC-PD5  The current situation has been updated as seen in the layout below

[Steve / Suresh / Kiwamu]

90 % of unused video cables have been removed.

Still a couple of video cables are floating around the video MUX. They will be removed in the next week's session.

Just a curiosity:

I just wonder how you have distingushed the difference between _111 and _111.

They are equivalent alone themselves. Have you looked at the contexts of the lines?
Or you just did not have the larger matrix than 16x16, did you?

Problem:

The original matrix naming conventions for the front ends was broken.  It used _11, _12,...,_1e, _1f, _110, _111 and so forth.  The code was changes to use _1_1, _1_2,...,_1_16,_1_17, and so on.

In addition the matrix of filter banks was modified to use the same naming convetion (instead of starting at zero, it now start with one).

Work Done:

I rebuilt all the models, and restarted them all.

I wrote a simple script to modify the burt restore files to have the correct names for all the stored matrix values.

I also modified all the suspension screens, by modifying the default screens in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/medm/master/

The C1SUS, C1SCX, C1SPX, C1SCY, C1SPY, and C1MCS models had their foton filter files modified to put filters into the newly changed named filters

I've just installed the new control room machine: "pianosa".   It is a replacement for the old sun machine "op440m" [0].

Hardware:

• dual dual-core Intel Core i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GH, hyperthreaded to provide 8 effective cores
• 16G memory (4x 4G dimms)
• nVidia GF108 GeForce GT 430

It's now running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64bit.  Unfortunately, the default 10.04 kernel is 2.6.32, which does not support pianosa's apparently very new network adapter, which is (from lspci):

00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 04)

To get around this I temporarily added a PCI nic so that I could get on the network.  I then added the Ubuntu kernel team PPA archive and installed linux-image-2.6.38-2, which is new enough to have the needed network driver, but not completely bleeding edge:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kernel-ppa/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install linux-image-2.6.38-2-generic linux-headers-2.6.38-2-generic

Once the built in nic was working I removed the temporary one.  Everything seems to be working fine now.

I have not yet done any configuration to integrate pianosa into the CDS network.  I'll do that tomorrow.

[0] op44m has been moved into the control room rack next to linux1, in headless mode.  If there is still a need to run scripts that only run on solaris, op440m can still be accessed via ssh as normal.  Hopefully we can fully decommission this machine soon.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~kernel-ppa/+archive/ppa

To understand the situation of the ADC cabling at the LSC rack I looked around the rack and the cables.

The final goal of this investigation is to have nice and noise less cables for the ADCs (i.e. non-ribbon cable)

Here is just a report about the current cabling.

(current configuration)

At the moment there is only one ribbon-twisted cable going from 1Y2 to 1Y3. (We are supposed to have 4 cables).

At the 1Y2 rack the cable is connected to an AA board with a 40 pin female IDC connector.

At the 1Y3 rack the cable is connected to an ADC board with a 37 pin female D-sub connector.

The ribbon cable is 28AWG with 0.05" conductor spacing and has 25 twisted pairs (50 wires).

(things to be done)

 - searching for a twisted-shielded cable which can nicely fits to the 40 pin IDC and 37 pin D-sub connectors.

 - estimating how long cable we need and getting the quote from a vendor.

 - designing a strain relief support

 We will make them all green !!

Again, all the files are available in the svn.

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/svn/trunk/suresh/40m_RF_upgrade/

Here is the idea how we upgrade the demodulation boards.

Basically we go ahead with two steps as depicted in the cartoon diagram below.

Once we finish the first step of upgrade, the board will be ready to install although the circuit won't be awesome in terms of noise performance.

* * * (details) * * *

 First of all we will replace the home-made 90 degree splitter (see this entry) by a commercial splitter, PSCQ-2-51-W+ from Mini circuit. This is the step 1 basically.

At this point the boards will be ready to use in principle. I asked Steve to get three 90 degree splitters so that we can have at least three demodulators for the dual-recycled Michelson locking.

If they work very fine we will buy some more 90 degree splitters for full locking.

While we try to lock the dual-recycled Michelson once we will get a Cougar amplifier, remove all ERA-5s and install it such that we don't have to gain up and down in the circuit. This is the last step.

One way to avoid some of the bad stuff in there is to take the 1 dBm input and amplify it to ~21 dBm before splitting and sending in to the Level 17 mixers.

One way to do this is by using the A3CP6025 from Teledyne-Cougar. Its an SMA connectorized amp which can put out 25 dBm and has a gain of 24 dB. We can just glue it onto the demod boards. Then we can remove the ERA-5 amplifiers and just use the broadband splitter as Kiwamu mentioned.

AS port ITMX YAW  range where AS beam was visible = [-1.505, -1.225] - these extrema put the beam just outside of some aperture in the system -> set ITMX YAW to -1.365

ITMX PITCH range = [-0.7707, -0.9707] -> set to ITMX PITCH to -0.8707

I was investigating the beat note amplitude on the vertex PD again yesterday. The incident power on the PD was 150uW in the PSL green beam and 700uW in the X-ARM green beam. With perfect overlap and a transimpedance of 240, I expected to get a beat note signal of around 25mV or -19dBm. Instead, the size was -57dBm. Bryan and I adjusted the alignment of the green PSL beam to try and improve the mode overlap but we couldn't do much better than about -50dBm. (The noise floor of the PD is around -65dBm).

When we projected the beams to the wall of the enclosure, the xarm beam was 2 to 3x as large as the PSL green beam, indicating that the beam size and/or curvatures on the PD were less than ideal. There is a telescope that the XARM beam goes through just before it gets to the PD. I mounted the second lens in this telescope on a longitudinal translation stage. With some finagling of the position of that lens we were able to improve the beatnote signal strength to -41dBm.

Obviously the ideal solution would be to measure the beam size and RoC of the PSL beam and XARM beams and then design a telescope that would match them as precisely as possible because there's still another 20dB signal strength to be gained.

[Rana, Koji, Kiwamu]

 Moreover the amplitude of the I and Q signals are highly unbalanced, depending on the LO power again.

This implies the coil for a 90 degree splitting won't work at 11 MHz since the coil is home made and used to be designed for a specific frequency (i.g. 24.5 MHz).

We decided to use a Mini circuit 90 deg splitter instead. Steve will order few of them soon and we will test it out.

Y-end PDH electronics.

The transfer function of the Y-end universal PDH box:

Plotting the data points yielded by the spec analyzer of my first LPF yielded a result that was not expected: the desired cutoff frequency wasn't achieved because of some extra 100k resistance that wasn't taken into consideration. (see  here ). I have redrawn the Bode graphs for this configuration so that it is easier to see that it is wrong (first attachment)

After some calculation adjustments, it was found that the capacitor value could remain at 10uF, but the resistance needed to be changed to 100k to maintain a gain of 0.5 and critical frequency at 0.1Hz. Second attachment is the Bode graph that results from this configuration.

Note: Bode graphs are both in Log-Linear scales (Wikipedia said so)

During checking the 11MHz demod boards I found that the I-Q relative phase showed funny LO power dependence.

It is now under investigation.

 In the plot above the green curve represents the I-Q phase of a 11MHz demod board (see here).

It showed a strong dependence on the LO power and it changes from -60 deg to -130 deg as the LO power changes.

This is not a good situation because any power modulation on the LO will cause a phase jitter.

For a comparison I also took I-Q relative phase of a 33MHz demod board, which hasn't been modified recently.

 It shows a nice flat curve up to 5 dBm although it looks like my rough measurement adds a systematic error of about -5 deg.

 - to do -

* check RF power in every point of LO path on the circuit

* check if there is saturation by looking at wave forms.

I have made a small python script to handle the video matrix.

It is too far from the perfection, but I release it as it is already useful in some extent.

The script is in the /cvs/cds/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/general directory.

usage:

videoswitch.py in_ch_name out_ch_name


in_ch_name is one of the followings

MC2F, IFOPO, OMCR, FI, AS_Spare, ITMYF, ITMXF, ETMYF, ETMXF,
PMCR, RCR, RCT, PSL_Spare, PMCT, ETMXT, MC2T, POP, IMCR, REFL,
MC1F, SRMF, AS, ETMYT, PRM, OMCT, Quad1, Quad2, Quad3

out_ch_name is one of the followings

Mon1, Mon2, Mon3, Mon4, Mon5, Mon6, Mon7,
ETMY, MC1, PSL1, PSL2, ETMX, MC2, CRT9,CRT10,Projector,
Quad1_1, Quad1_2, Quad1_3, Quad1_4,
Quad2_1, Quad2_2, Quad2_3, Quad2_4,
Quad3_1, Quad3_2, Quad3_3, Quad3_4


While Kiwamu was working on the RF cabling at the LSC rack, I removed 80% of SMA cables which were not connected anywhere.
The rack is cleaner now, but not perfect yet. We need patch panels/strain relieving for heliaxes, cleaning up of the RF/LO cables, etc.

[Koji / Kiwamu]

The Michelson was locked with the new LSC realtime code.

(what we did)

 --  Fine alignment of the Michelson, including PZTs, BS and ITMY.

  Since the X arm has been nicely aligned we intentionally avoided touching ITMX. The IR beam now is hitting the center of both end mirrors.

  At the end we lost X arm's resonance for IR. This probably means the PZTs need more careful alignments.

-- Signal acquisition

 We replaced the RFPD (AS55) that Aidan and Jamie nicely installed by POY11 because we haven't yet  installed a 55MHz RF source.

The maximum DC voltage from the PD went to about 50 mV after aligning steering mirrors on the AP table.

The RF signal from the PD is transferred by a heliax cable which has been labeled 'REFL33'.

Then the RF signal is demodulated at a demodulation board 'AS11', which is one of the demodulation boards that Suresh recently modified.

Although we haven't fully characterized the demod board the I and Q signal looked healthy.

Finally the demod signals go to ADC_0_3 and ADC_0_4 which are the third and fourth channel.

They finally show up in REFL33 path in the digital world.

-- Control

 With the new LSC code we fedback the signal to BS. We put anti-whitening filters in the I and Q input filter banks.

We found that dataviewer didn't show correct channels, for example C1LSC_NREFL33I showed just ADC noise and C1LSC_NREFL33Q showed NREFL_33I.

Due to this fact we gave up adjusting the digital phase rotation and decided to use only the I-phase signal.

Applying a 1000:10 filter gave us a moderate lock of the Michelson. The gain was -100 in C1LSC_MICH_GAIN and this gave us the UGF of about 300 Hz.

 Note that during the locking both ETMs were intentionally misaligned in order not to have Fabry-Perot fringes.

[Jenne Koji]

The PD signals are transmitted to the suspension now.

The trigger thresholds were set to -1. This means the triggers are always on.

OK… the Y-arm may be locked with green light, which was the goal, and this is all good but it's not yet awesome. Awesome would be locked and aligned properly and quiet and optimised. So...  in order to assist in increasing the awesome-osity, here are a few stream-of-consciousness thoughts and stuff I've noticed and haven't had time to fix/investigate or have otherwise had pointed out to me that may help...

Firstly, the beam is not aligned down the centre of the cavity. It's pretty good horizontally, but vertically it's too low by about 3/4->1cm on ETMY. The mirrors steering the beam into the cavity have no more vertical range left, so in order to get the beam higher the final two mirrors will have to be adjusted on the bench. Adding another mirror to create a square will give more range AND there will be less light lost due to off 45degree incident angles. When I tried this before I couldn't get the beam to return through the Faraday, but now the cavity is properly aligned this should not be a problem.

A side note on alignment - while setting cameras and viewports and things up, Steve noticed that one of the cables to one of the coils (UL) passes behind the ETMY. One of the biggest problems in getting the beam into the system to begin with was missing this cable. It doesn't fall directly into the beam path if the beam is well aligned to the cavity, but for initial alignment it obscures the beam - this may be a problem later for IR alignment.

Next, the final lambda/2 waveplate is not yet in the beam. This will only become a problem when it comes to beating the beams together at the vertex, but it WILL be a problem. Remember to put it in before trying to extract signals for full LSC cavity locking.

Speaking of components and suchlike things, the equipment for the green work was originally stored in 3 plastic boxes which were stored near the end of the X-arm. These boxes, minus the components now used to set up the Y-end, are now similarly stored near the end of the Y-arm.

Mechanical shutter - one needs to be installed on the Y-end just like the X-end. Wasn't necessary for initial locking, but necessary for remote control of the green light on/off.

Other control… the Universal PDH box isn't hooked up to the computers. Connections and such should be identical to the X-arm set-up, but someone who knows what they're doing should hook things up appropriately.

More control - haven't had a chance to optimise the locking and stability so the locking loop, while it appears to be fairly robust, isn't as quiet as we would like. There appears to be more AM coupling than we initially thought based on the Lightwave AM/PM measurements from before. It took a bit of fiddling with the modulation frequency to find a quiet point where the apparent AM effects don't prevent locking. 279kHz is the best point I've found so far. There is still a DC offset component in the feedback that prevents the gain being turned up - unity gain appears limited to about 1kHz maximum. Not sure whether this is due to an offset in the demod signal or from something in the electronics and haven't had time left to check it out properly yet. Again, be aware this may come back to bite you later.

Follow the bouncing spot - the Y-arm suspensions haven't been optimised for damping. I did a little bit of fiddling, but it definitely needs more work. I've roughly aligned the ETMY oplev since that seems to be the mass that's bouncing about most but a bit of work might not go amiss before trusting it to damp anything.

Think that's about all that springs to mind for now…

Thanks to everyone at the 40m lab for helping at various times and answering daft questions, like "Where do you keep your screwdrivers?" or "If I were a spectrum analyser, where would I be?" - it's been most enjoyable!

[Joe, Alex]

Problem Symptoms:

There were red lights on the status screen indicating RFM errors for the c1scy, c1mcs and c1rfm processes.

The c1iscey, c1sus machines were receiving data sent over the RFM network from the c1ioo computer with a bad time stamp, a few cycles too late.  The c1iscex computer was receiving data from c1ioo fine.

Problem:

The c1iscex RFM card had gotten into a bad state and was somehow slowing things down/corrupting data.  It didn't affect itself, but due to the loop topology was messing everyone else up.  Basically the only one who wasn't throwing an error was the culprit.

Solution:

Hard power cycling the c1iscex computer reset the RFM card and fixed the problem.