Homestake meeting, 10/16/14 Attending: Vuk, Riccardo, Tanner, Victor, Pat, Gary, Nelson Homestake wiki: https://zzz.physics.umn.edu/groups/homestake/home Our agenda: 1) Homestake update Vuk: Liteway expects to deliver 4 GPS transceivers next week to UMN, and the rest in 2-3 weeks to Homestake. Should know more precisely early next week. Gary and Vuk spoke with PASSCAL, they expect to be able to send us 8 full stations in 2 weeks. Add another 1-2 weeks for shipping etc, we could start installing them around Nov 15. So, we should start making plans for another trip around that time. Could install 4-5 surface stations and 3-4 underground stations (probably focus on 4850 for the time being, maybe also try 4100-A as our best former station). Will need at least Gary and Tanner. Will contact Jaret and Bryce to discuss timing of the visit. Daniel and Victor unlikely to make it in Nov. Pat's availability would depend on the exact days, but could try. Gary could be there for 3 days, more than that would be hard. Tanner could go for a week or so, will have to work around another trip. Two surface stations per day should be doable. Similar for underground, assuming power and network are set up. Gary: PASSCAL has radios available. Tim Parker talked about devices to switch power on and off, such as radios or GPS devices underground. These are small devices consuming little power, with dip switches to set the duty cycle. Radios are 5W, solar panels should provide 120W (two 60W panels), so we may be ok even without the switch, and use one battery. So we may be able to work without these switches on the surface, should look at the details. Underground at battery powered stations this may be useful, but we have to check the timing accuracy if the GPS transceivers are off for 6 hours or 12 hours. Will have to experiment in situ. Possibly look at this during the upcoming trip. For this trip, probably leave the highschool site for later, but the other 5 surface sites could be done during this trip. Could use smart chargers for batteries even at AC powered stations (as a UPS solution). So could use one battery per station underground as well. In total, we want to order 8 batteries before this trip. Plan to install the radio antenna near the GPS antenna on the roof of the admin building. Could be an issue for the Yates station, but it is close so hopefully will work. Tanner: PASSCAL provides clamps to attach to power supply, but we should do something better. Gary: Want a cable that ends with a ring connector that could connect to the battery directly. Should talk to PASSCAL and let them know that this is what we want. Tanner: what about the surface computer? Gary: PASSCAL will send us a Linux box with 2 or 4 ethernet ports, and will be pre-built and ready to go (with antelope installed). We will need to configure the parameters and IP addresses, but should be straightforward. 2) UMN test setup (Tanner) Tanner: q3302orb running and putting data into a buffer. orb2db grabbing data from buffer and moving into files. Currently not saving all the relevant data, probably have to sync the configuration files. Tim at PASSCAL should be able to help with this. Tanner should contact Tim directly and interact with him to set it up. Tanner: should determine the convention for naming the stations. Gary: PASSCAL should give us a code for the site, and then we can add names identifiers for other stations. Should not use more than 3-4 letters. Gary will send a message to PASSCAL to set this up. Tanner: will have to update the firmware on all digitizers and balers, 15 per pair, but this may add up. Don't need internet for it. Should be able to set this up without Gary. Vuk: will receive a mix of STS2, T240s and Guralps. Guralps may be good for some surface locations that may flood. May need to add height (landscaping timber) to our stations if installing Guralps. May have to move some dirt on the top to reduce temperature fluctuations. Vuk: calibration of different instruments? Gary: Q330s have a feature where you can turn on the calibration in situ, and use the actual calibration instead of the nominal one. The calibration is stored in metadata, the actual data is in counts. Will have to worry about it when we convert to frames. 3) Analysis of existing data No news.