Trouble Shooting Guide

This is a trouble shooting guide for tohbans monitoring EOVSA remotely using MobaXterm and VNC Viewer.

<General checklist for solar observation>

1. Check Antenna Status Page to see if any antenna is under work

2. In Schedule window, click Today, File, choose Save (overwrite if prompted), and Go.

3. Antenna on track or not

4. Frequency Tuning: "Sweeping" & Phase Tracking: "ON"

5. Attenuation values

6. Temperature plot

7. hpol & vpol plots (Savelist)

8. Make sure that EOVSA Observing Status Page is being updated

9. STOW antennas at the end of the observation, if needed

Schedule window

“Error: Could not write stateframe to SQL”

1. hit STOP on the schedule

2. type $scan-stop in Raw Command window (to stop the data recording)

3. close the schedule (exit out of it)

4. restart the program (by clicking on the icon at the left)

5. hit GO to start the observation again

Stateframe

“ACC down?”

1. Open pdudigital.solar.pvt on web browser

2. Go to “Actions”

3. Go to “Loads” (on the left)

4. Click item 14 (ACC)

5. Hit “Cycle” and “Ok” when prompted

After rebooting, if Stateframe hangs up & does not respond, open a new Stateframe and give "kill ##" (## = “My PID” on the upper right corner of frozen Stateframe) command to sched@helios.solar.pvt server.

Antenna(s) down

Don’t forget to check the Antenna Status page before considering to “fix” any of the antennas!!

Symptoms: Not tracking, showing ‘AT STOW’ or other unwanted coordinates, both AZ and EL permits ON or only EL permit ON, or Axis Lock is ON

1. If only AZ permit is ON (the first column), try "reboot 1 ant2" for rebooting ant2, for example.

2. If both AZ and EL permit is ON (the second column) or only EL permit is ON, then give command "$pcycle ant2" for resetting antenna 2. This switches OFF the power to antenna for 15 seconds and switches ON. In Communication tab, Ant 2 line will go red. Wait till it becomes white. If it does not become white, then try "sync ant2". If cRIO does not respond to this, it may be in “safe mode”, in which case you can type $pcycle crio ant2 (if on ants 1-8 or 12) and it will cycle the power on the cRIO. Note that cRIO takes at least 2 minutes to reboot and come back online.

3. Give "tracktable [the current tracktable ***.radec] ant2" and "track ant2" to initiate the tracking. If this does not work, look for temperature to raise (if temperature is low).

Frequency Tuning's Sweep Status is “stopped”

1. Try "Stop" and "Go" the schedule.

2. If #1 does not work, try "loa1-reboot" in Raw command window

3. If #2 does not work, try the following raw commands:

fseq-off
fseq-init
fseq-file [the current frequency receiver setting ***.fsq]
fseq-on

hpol/vpol plot (Savelist) is showing unusual oscillating behavior

What you should see is the dBm values of the antenna fluctuating very violently like in Figure 1 (left: orange - ant 12 , right: red and cyan - ant 2 and 5).

This happens when hattn/vattn settings of the antenna get changed somehow and two polarizations get very unbalanced. The result is that the automatic gain control is not being able to find a happy level for both at the same time, and went into an oscillation. To calm it down, first issue the commands:

femauto-off ant#
hattn 0 0 ant#
vattn 0 0 ant#

which turns off the automatic gain control. And then set the hattn and vattn settings until both power levels were around 3 dB, i.e.:

hattn 0 12 ant#
vattn 0 11 ant#

where the choice of attenuations (12 and 11) were those that set the power level close to 3 dB. Finally, turn the gain control back on, with

femauto-on ant#

If the fluctuation is within one FEMATTN step (2 dB as of now, see Schedule Command - FEMATTN level), the cause might be just interference. In this case, leave it for a while and see if the oscillation goes away.

Data recording (DPP)

Data recording has stopped (ls /data1/IDB |tail does not return the most recent file)

You need to delete dpplock.txt file. Follow these steps:

1. Enter "top" into user@dpp.solar.pvt command line (if user@dpp.solar.pvt is not there, open a new terminal/terminal tab in VNC viewer & type “ssh -X user@dpp.solar.pvt).

2. Look for "dppxmp” under “command” column. If it is there, do NOT delete dpplock.txt. If it’s not there, then quit top by hitting “q” and:

3. Type “cd ~/test_svn/Miriad/dpp” (correct directory as of 12/12/2016) and find dpplock.txt which should be there.

4. Type “rm dpplock.txt” to remove the lock file.

Network

Cannot open VNC Viewer, or VNC Viewer's response is too slow

Open the “local” raw command window and Stateframe window by following these steps:

1. Type "cd Dropbox/PythonCode/Current" in helios.solar.pvt terminal of MobaXterm

2. Type "./sched_commands.py" for raw command window

3. Type "./sf_display.py" for Stateframe window (add “ &” in the end if you want to keep typing the command in the same helios window) -- note that this Stateframe window may take a while (~5 min or more) to load