19 Sep 03

19 September 2003 Status at Aquatic Hillcrest

Headline: Dead in the Wasser

We have an encouraging start to the day. We arrived to find the radar running better than it was running when we left last night. A few of the faults had cleared themselves, but a couple new ones appeared. The situation display was able to restart at about 1732, and stayed on all night without being stopped due to the target overload we saw when we started the radar. Sgt. Pohl and Ron conferred and Sgt. Pohl told me in a cheerful way "the radar is running well."

Bill and I climbed over the crates and boxes, moved the ladders and opened the crates to inspect the insides, looking for the torque wrench that some folks think is here. After looking through the gantry crates and all the other boxes, we can NOT find a torque wrench. Sgt. Pohl says the one he has located will not work as it won't extend the length of the studs. We still need the torque wrench and crow's foot and Brad will have to bring it with him Monday.

Ron is analyzing the hour's worth of REPS data we took this morning. Sgt. Pohl will show us how to cable our laptops to the Vax and be able to download these files.

Hubert Merkel, our agent, wrote and said he plans a 4 day motorbike tour and will stop by sometime over the weekend.

Sgt. Pohl told us this morning that he is staying here through the weekend and next weekend to help us. He said if we needed him to work or help out in any way it would not be a problem. I asked him to check in on us each day and see if we need help and he agreed. He also feels that if we can start the tests early, it will not be a problem. We just need to coordinate with Herr Barz and the GAF will re-arrange orders to cooperate. Of course, the flights planned for 6 and 13 October can not be moved.

Sgt. Pohl and I are going to contact Altenberg today and get their jumper setting from the disk drive board in the SPU of their RES. If that does not correct our problem, we can probably borrow their SPU next week to troubleshoot our RES. Sgt. Pohl says it's about a 3 hour drive to that site, but we can probably arrange it.

Sgt. Pohl helped me hook up his cables to my laptop and the Vax and we now can dump ASCII files to the laptop over a serial cable, from there to the web, and there Doug and Steve can get them in Syracuse for analysis. This adds only a couple hours of cycle time for each round of needing systems engineering expertise to debug the radar.

By lunch time, the radar was running pretty good, and we were down to just a few faults. But we two bad row receivers that were just repaired and returned here, in rows 5 and 32. There are several other row receiver faults.

After lunch we have a noise detector fault that is being run down. This problem has now cost us 2.5 hours. A call in to Steve Dunyk was returned but no miracles. This occurred right after I told Bob Knox we won't need an RF switch. Ron and Bill are now checking the RF switch outputs to see if that's the problem. The radar seems to be working, but the MFI is indicating low power. Sgt. Pohl says the GAF sees this problem from time to time at other sites, and they tend to consider it an MFI problem, not a radar problem. They make some adjustments and ignore it.

We transferred a 1.3MB text file, from the REPS run this morning, that represents about 21 scans of data, over a 9600 baud serial line to my PC. Then I copied it to a CDROM and put it on my work PC, since my work PC COM1 port seems to be broken. Then e-mailed it to Steve Dunyk and Doug Hornbacker for analysis. Steve points out it would be more useful to port the binary file. I tried this with Sgt. Pohl's help for about an hour, but we could not figure out how to move a binary file from the VMS system to a Windows laptop. If anyone knows how to do this, the information would be GREATLY appreciated.

At 16:00, no sign of the COTS shipment. No word on the blank procedures, the breaker, the battery, the torque wrench. Also, no idea how to fix the row receivers (that were just repaired) in time for the formal SAT. No spares on hand.

At 18:45, the radar stopped giving the noise detector fault (594.0), which is good, but we have no frequencies, with a fault on the A6 (627.6) board of the frequency synthesizer. Also getting flags 8113, 8114, 8108 (synthesizer faults).

Contracts position is that the easiest thing to do about not having the test procedure documents is for the team in Germany to photocopy the 1997 test report documents we have, whiteout the results and dates marked in them (every page), get more copies made for the formal test.

No answer for sure on the breaker, the battery, the torque wrench, the sockets (crow's feet) either.

At 19:30 (13:30 in Syracuse) Terry Richfield called to see if we REALLY needed the spectrum analyzer sent. My answer is yes. Terry did a GREAT job and got it shipped today, and just now provided me with the air bill number THANKS TERRY!!! And thanks to Nanci Sharak and Robin Green and Paula Trudell who all helped a lot in making this happen.

Tomorrow we will re-assess what the radar is doing when we get to the radome in the morning. Sgt. Pohl is going to come in and help us try to fix the frequency synthesizer if possible. We probably need to ask the GAF depot to provide 5 row receivers, a power supply and an RF switch, since these items appear to be faulty, even though they have been returned for repair at least once in our shop in the last year.

Daily oil leak analysis: Looks the same as yesterday, no more oil drops. The worst of the leak looks like it's coming out of a temperature sensor. There is a cable bundle directly beneath it that had lots of oil on it when we got here. That cable now has a drop and there's a drop on the sensor and the wire leading from it to the panel. And in the drain pan that catches the leaks, most of the oil is pooled under the temperature sensor.

Photos from today:

Bill Ratliffe trying to analyze the output of the RF switch, about 1600.