To: Edgar Castro

From: Jon Hagen

Date: August 31, 2000

Subject: Report for August, 2000

The new collector was installed above the carriage house and tested up to the available maximum power of 2MW without gas pressurization.. No arcing was observed. After the unit has been tested while in motion, it will be removed. If it shows no evidence of arcing - soot or pitting, the lab in Ithaca will begin building a duplicate so that both the carriage house and the Gregorian can be fitted with the new design.

The high-power 430 MHz installation in the Gregorian is nearly complete. Several custom waveguide sections have been prepared. Airtron is working on one of the flexible sections and a parallel effort is going on in our shop.

Signatron reports that they are fixing the final remaining bug in the VLBI terminal they are building for Arecibo, and that it will be ready for a second round of factory acceptance testing in early September.

A circuit was designed to allow replacement of the twelve defective and obsolete magnet current meter relays on the console of the 430 MHz transmitter. The meters will be replaced by standard meters. Each meter will carry a small circuit board with components to establish a minimum current threshold and tie into the transmitter's interlock chain.

Work is underway to improve our ability to troubleshoot and modify the Vertex drive systems.

In particular, the spare crate, controller, and i/o cards are being run in the lab with the program development system in an effort to provide further software documentation and to master the various procedures needed to load and debug the program and the hardware modules.