In Bob’s database news: As we noted in our server meeting, we had an unremarkable weekend, which was actually remarkable. We had to add some space to the Beta Database, but everything worked out fine.

After looking through a few thousand waterfall plots, Adam found a few pulses. He looked at 3000, and there are about 30,000 of them. Josh looked through his 10 minutes of data and also saw a pulse. After closer inspection, it is pretty clear that they are looking at the same pulse. Good work!

The next thing on Adam’s agenda is to start producing false signals for astropulse and cleaning up the program to convert the spectrometer data.

Jeff is getting ready for his month-long trek through Nepal, so this will be his last weekly meeting for a while. This week he’ll tying up loose ends with the RFI framework, and will be meeting with Eric on Thursday to transfer the current status of the RFI framework over to him.

Eric The theoretical ATI (graphics chips) volunteer-written application for astropulse is not yet at the point were we and put it into beta. It can find repeating pulses, but it is not functioning when it comes to single pulses.

Also, alpha is down (they took it down to fix beam 6 B) until early November (earliest November 5th). That unfortunately puts a lot of projects, like figuring out why the data recorder is crashing, on the back burner.

Matt has progressed “leaps and bounds” on the radar blanking project—he discovered that he has to increase or decrease the inter-pulse periods by 4/10 of a microsecond when he uploads the data, because he is folding it so many times. This correction makes the smudges go away. Dan wondered if could he fold less data to make the error less critical, and possibly speed up the time it takes it to run. As of now, it is roughly doing the analysis in real time (i.e. a 25 second chunk of data will take 25 second to process). Despite these details, the point is that RADAR blanking is working, and it will be really nice to get it up and running through some raw data here soon!

And now the big question: Will we run out of data. We have 2 drives of data on the shelf, and two at Arecibo and we can pull up some other data. So it looks like we should be good for the next few weeks.

Dan and Andrew are leaving for South Africa for a CASPER workshop. They will hopefully be in contact by email, but that might be tough, since the DSL connection in South Africa is slower than carrier pigeons. So we’ll just expect a carrier pigeon update from Dan and Andrew to drop by our meeting next week.