A2127: checking the data quality.

feb06

on/off total power repeatability

Intro:

    A2127 used the xband receiver to  track a source rise to set on 3 separate dates (14feb06,08mar06, and 03apr06). On, off position switching with 5 minute durations and 1 second dumps were done.  The wapps were used with 4 100 Mhz bands. Each band had 4096 channels.
    There was rain during the  08mar06 observation. The on source position had no continuum in it.


On,off total power  versus az.

    The total power over each 100 Mhz band was computed and then plotted versus azimuth for each of the 1 second dumps.  Since position switching was used, there are two tracks (the on and the off) that cover the same az, (the  300 on samples followed by the 300 off samples). For each on or off there are 4 separate traces that correspond to the 4 frequency bands taken (the 2 polarizations have been averaged). The scan number for each on position scan is also printed. The source rises at az=310 and sets at az=410.

    The plots below show the total power versus az for the runs (.ps) (.pdf):

Overplotting the on,offs shows that there is considerable total power variation on 08mar06 when it rained.


The rms of the bandpasses, histogram of the data.

    Each 5 minute on/off was processed and scaled to kelvins. A baseline was then removed (linear polynomial, 4th order haromonic). The data was then smoothed by 20 channels. The rms across the frequency band was then computed (ignoring  10% of the edges because of filter rolloff).
 A histogram of all of the on offs for a day was then made.
     The plots show the  rms of the on,off bandpasses and a histogram of the data (.ps) (.pdf): The rms's are pretty close to the expected values. The 08mar06 data has trouble after the 5th pattern when the rain started (my bet would be that the pointing was probably off too). None of the other on/off pairs stick out as particularly bad (so there is no reason to not include them in the averaging).


  <- page up
home_~phil