Progress During May

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

During May we collected 156 CD's of data.  This has to be a 
record.  Roughly 50 from each system with TOM3 on the short side.  The 
month was spent struggling to get everything working.  Mostly this 
succeed.  TOM3 still has a noise problem.  We will make a new cable and see 
if that does it.  Each thing we do helps a little.  Putting a filter on the 
chiller was the biggest improvement.  The combined engineering and recent 
data is now close to 30 million measurement pairs.

This month we added a rain detector to the dome.  It has worked and closes 
the dome when it rains.  All we need is to work out communication over the 
network so that we can let everyone know when it is cloudy or when it is 
raining.  Dan is itching to automate the coo coo clock mount for TOM1.   We 
found a better memory card and this fixed part of the TOM3 problem.  Now 
there is just the cable pick up noise to fix.

We have completed the processing of all the old data.  It is on it's way to 
the data base as I type this.  Data processing is now pretty much routine.

We have made a change in the procedure.  We are now (as of May 30) saving 
the processed .fits files instead of the original.  We think this is a 
small loss of original data in favor of being able to have more effective 
use of the nearly raw images for studying strange events.

We keep improving the home network.  The big addition this month was an 
ADSL line.  It was a struggle but now it seems to be working OK.  One just 
has to attract the attention of the phone company and get across that you 
really want the line to work.  Now we have to figure out how to let any of 
the computers access the internet.  At present only Windows boxes see 
it.  The switch boxes arrived an now I have one less monitor on my 
desk.  There is more consolidation coming.

Tom Droege