Minutes/Action items of "Instrumentation-Systems-SDA" monthly meeting
May 6, 2009
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D. Capista, M. Convery, C. McClure, T. Meyer,D. Morris, V. Papadimitriou, 
L. Prost, D. Slimmer, R. Thurman-Keup, M. Wendt, J. Zagel



We discussed the following:
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1) Main Injector IPM status 
a) hardware - Jim Zagel
b) data analysis - Denton Morris


2) VRFT status - Craig McClure



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Conclusions-Action Items:


1) 
a) Recent changes for the IPM system were:
i) Modification to the Preamplifiers to improve the signal to noise.
ii) Using a single power supply instead of two for each IPM board 
iii) Improved grounding
iv) The 120V fan for the preamplifier was replaced with a 24 V DC fan in order
to reduce noise.

The maximum number of counts for the H2 IPM is now 30.
Jim plans to increase the gain for the vertical IPM (at Q103) in order to improve 
the signal to noise.

The plan is to replace all the IPM microchannel plates during the summer shutdown.
Before the shutdown we would like to try and develop a plan to measure the lifetime 
of the plates.


1) 
b)
After the hardware changes noted above, we have no missing IPM data and the noise 
level in the the fractional tune and other IPM measurements looks greatly improved.
This is true for both the H2 and V1 IPMs.
There is still work in progress on specification timing for the Main Injector $2B 
event (Proton Injection).

The plan is to try and correlate the IPM data with other MI instrumentation, like
BPMs and Flying Wires. In addition it is being considered to change beam positions 
and angles in the MI8 transfer line and see if we can verify them with the IPM.

The time stamp of the IPM data has been datalogged since the last meeting.
An improvement we plan to implement, is convert the univeral timestamp to text
for the parameter page. 



2) 
The first VRFT board is in the process of being debugged and tested.  
One of the issues worked on is talking to the board through VME.  
The tested VRFT should be delivered to Jim Zagel within a month.  
A second VRFT is being assembled as well. 



Our next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, June 3, 2009, at 2:00 pm.