VLA Test/Observation Coordination Meeting
                           B.G. Clark
                          July 15, 2004


1.  eVLA

B. Clark reports that Antenna 13 has been down for the last 3 plus 
weeks to have its fiber wrap and fibers replaced, so not much has 
been done since the last test meeting.  The 20cm system is up and 
running, and at last the switched noise source detector is running.
A display of the switched power as a function of time showed only
a modest downturn at the lowest elevation used, about 18 degrees.
VLA antennas are down by a factor of 1.5 or more at this elevation.
L band beam scans were done.  The beam appears circular, with the
expected 29' width, and the first sidelobe is the expected 4%.

P. Napier called attention to a recent EVLA memo showing that the
system components do not provide the required spectral flatness of
5 dB over a 2 GHz bandpass.  Current plan is to provide a switchable
bandpass slope corrector.  The algorithm for controlling this flattener
is not totally clear.  It was generally felt undesirable that it 
should switch itself to the desired state, in an ALC-like fashion.
Likely implementation is a table of settings to use versus frequency,
which does pose operational issues in maintaining this largish table
(perhaps forty entries for each antenna). 

2.  Pipelines

E. Greisen has implemented a new, experimental, task in AIPS called
FLAGR, which supports various algorithms for automatic flagging of
data.  Once sufficient lore and heuristics are developed for this,
it is hoped that it would be the foundation for flagging in a pipeline
system to make images untouched by human hands.