M6 Preparations:

• L1 Status (Mike Zucker)
  Mike reported that LLO commissioners are in a phase of triage, deciding which issues are most important and amenable to address before the S4 run. Before the holidays, L1 achieved an inspiral range of 3.5 Mpc, close to the nominal S4 goal of 4 Mpc. But other work since then has temporarily degraded that sensitivity. Expect to regain it soon, however. Recent work has focussed on changing coil driver resistors to permit lower noise at low frequencies and trying to fix phase noise troubles at high frequencies. L1 now locks well during the day and can even ride out a train passage. HEPI is now being commissioned on HAM modules, which should help L1 ride out large microseismic noise from Gulf storms (beam pointing jitter). That work may not be completed before M6, however. There will be operators on shift 24/7 during M6, and the calibration team plans to have calibration reference functions reasdy before the run begins.
  
  
• Schedule and goals (Keith Riles)
  KR stated that the primary goal of the M6 is to verify that DMT monitors are functioning correctly. Unlike the M5 run, this should not be regarded as a debugging run. DMT authors should be ensuring their code runs successfully now at LLO. After discussion with MikeZ, the M6 schedule was fixed to be Saturday (Jan 22) noon CST to Monday (Jan 24) at noon. DMT authors should send KR their travel plans for the run or contact information during the run.
  
  

S3 and E11 Investigations:

• Calibrations (Mike Landry, Gaby Gonzalez, Brian O'Reilly, Patrick Sutton)
  The final S3 calibration is very close to ready (travel and jury duty interfered with completion this week). The work should be completed by the end of next week. The alpha's and beta's for the E11 run are being regenerated and should also be ready about the same time (reference functions are already available). Fred suggested that a good monitor for the future (online or offline) would be one that tracks the unity gain frequency as a diagnostic of imminent servo instability.
  
  
• Glitches (Laura Cadonati, Erik Katsavounidis)
  Laura reported that the Glitch Team is finalizing the S3 tunings and revisiting acoustic events. E11 WaveBurst triggers are now available and will be looked at soon.
  
  
• An E11 inspiral/glitch correlation (Nelson Christensen)
  Nelson and his students have started looking at glitches from E11, focussing first on a dozen inspiral triggers. Results from looking at one of the loudest triggers were shown. There are coincident glitches in PRC_CTRL and on a number of environmental channels, but only PRC_CTRL is clearly associated. KR suggested widening the time window to understand better the auxiliary channel ambient noise.
  
  
• E11 line Correlations (Nelson Christensen)
  Nelson's students are compiling line coherence tables from E11, similar to those provided already for S2 and S3. A number of lines are correlated between H1 and seismometers, microphones and magnetometers. Work is just getting started on understanding sources.
  
  
• Environmental Disturbances (Robert Schofield)
  No update.
  
  
• Strong lines (E11 vs S3) (Keith Thorne)
  Keith described an interesting finding that came out of the data conditioning for the BlockNormal burst analysis. Kalman fits are attempted on strong lines seen in the spectrum (excluding calibration and 60 Hz harmonics). Keith found that in S3 all three interferometers had a distinct comb of lines separated by ~37 Hz, with slightly different values for the interferometers. The lines are narrow (<4 mHz) but not quite stationary. They moved around a bit during the run. Peter suggested that the slightly different baseline frequencies and small variations might indicate mechanical resonances with thermal effects. KR reported that he was able to confirm the comb's presence by going back to some spectra produced by Vladimir Dergachev last year. He also mentioned that Robert Schofield had been queried on a possible source for the lines, but couldn't think of anything plausible with such a narrow width. The LHO crew on the call couldn't think of a plausible source either. KeithT reported that a look through E11 data showed the comb still to be present in H2 but not in H1. Apparently, the  problem was fixed somehow.
  
  
• Data Quality (John Zweizig, Peter Shawhan, Keith Riles)
  KR mentioned the E11 version 1 DQ release made in late December and promised to provide an S3 version 4 DQ release as soon as the final S3 calibration with revised bad alpha/beta interval listings is available. Anyone having other flags to add to this release should get them to KR soon.
  

DMT Software Status:

• John Zweizig: Infrastructure status
  John fixed a problem found by John Whelan when running on linux, in which decimation via the data accessor was absurdly inefficient. He also found and fixed the likely culprit behind a slew of apparent floating point underflow traps in E11 for LineMon and BurstMon. The problem was due to a change in the data accessor shortly before the run, where assignments weren't preserving number type. He also found and fixed some memory leaks in PulsarMon. The deadline for new DMT code to be run in M6 is next Friday (January 14). John plans to tag a version 2.10.2 the following Monday. He will be at Livingston for the run from the evening of January 19 until January 24.
  
  
• Keith Riles: DMT trend channel names (strawman proposal)
  Following up on a suggestion Patrick Sutton made after the E11 run, KR proposed a new standardized naming convention for DMT trend channels, to avoid the frame builder confusion seen in E11. KR will iterate with John and Daniel, and Alex Ivanov to finalize the convention. KR will request Alex to allow the frame builder to recognize longer names (now limited to 39 characters total, excluding file extension).
  
  
• Patrick Sutton: Calibration infrastructure
  Patrick is helping John Whelan and Marc Cenac with an EasyCalibrate compilation problem and discussing with Sergey Klimenko and Igor Yakushin the possibility of doing burst group MDC simulations in the DMT. He would need to implement the reading of old alpha's/beta's from an xml file for those simulations. That support has been planned for some time, but is not yet ready. Patrick confirmed that the extraction of calibration line amplitude is once again supported by SenseMonitor.
  
  
• John Whelan / Mark Cenac / Brian O'Reilly: StochMon
  John reported by e-mail that their DMT installation is finally working under linux, after some help from John., and Marc is working hard to get StochMon compatible with EasyCalibrate. Another Loyola student, Thair Judeh, has started work on a coherence monitor to complement StochMon.
  
  
• Ken Ganezer: seis_blrms
  Ken has been trying to understand apparent filter ringdowns at LHO and LLO, following data dropouts. He finds ringdowns to be more pronounced at LHO than at LLO. He finds long data dropouts (~1 minute) lead to large ringdowns. KR asked for some examples to be shown at next week's telecon. Ken presently sees apparent dropouts at LLO every 10-15 minutes. John said he would try upping the priority on the data pusher.
  
  
• Sergey Klimenko: BurstMon
  Sergey is glad to have the number trap problem fixed in BurstMon and LineMon. He doesn't have any major modifications planned before M6, but promised to revisit some lingering problems KR found in E11.
  
  
• Giovanni Santostasi: PulsarMon
  Giovanni is back from vacation and working at LLO to understand the discrepancy between online and offline behavior of PulsarMon.
  
  
• Rauha Rahkola: SuspensionMon
  Rauha plans to increase some trigger thresholds and investigate a slow memory leak reported by JohnZ in E11. At KR's request, he will verify by next week that all trends are once again being written to disk, now that the trend channel names are believed to be fixed.
  

• Next detchar telecon: Friday January 14 at 1:30 p.m. EST