About 2 weeks ago, I noticed some odd behaviour of the LSC TRY data stream. Its DC value seems to be drifting ~10x more than TRX. Both signals come from the transmission QPDs. At the time, we were dealing with various CDS FE issues but things have been stable on that end for the last two weeks, so I looked into this a bit more today. It seems like one particular channel is bad - Quadrant 4 of the ETMY TRANS QPD. Furthermore, there is a bump around 150Hz, and some features above 2kHz, that are only present for the ETMY channels and not the ETMX ones.

Since these spectra were taken with the PSL shutter closed and all the lab room lights off, it would suggest something is wrong in the electronics - to be investigated.

The drift in TRY can be as large as 0.3 (with 1.0 being the transmitted power in the single arm lock). This seems unusually large, indeed we trigger the arm LSC loops when TRY > 0.3. Attachment #2 shows the second trend of the TRX and TRY 16Hz EPICS channels for 1 day. In the last 12 hours or so, I had left the LSC master switch OFF, but the large drift of the DC value of TRY is clearly visible.

In the short term, we can use the high-gain THORLABS PD for TRY monitoring.