Tuesday Oct 5, 2004

1.  Today was the first day of the 25ns structured beam. In the past week
the five chambers have been tested and timed in. The original set-up
with which we ended our X5a test in June'04 has been used as the
base-line system. Four chambers, two peripheral crates with
scintillator and TrackFinder triggers. In the 2nd half of the week we
have added the ME1/1 chamber mounted on the HCAL and distributed the
peripheral electronics (TMB/DMB) over four crates. Besides the
addition of chambers and peripheral crates we also installed the FED
crate which has one DDU and one DCC and replaces the previous DDU
which was located in one of the peripheral crates.

2.  At 9am a safety inspection team led by Peter Schilly inspected our
set-up (gas, LH/HV, electronics, and CSCs) and had only a couple of
minor remarks about the grounding of our HV/LV rack to the fence, and
signs at those racks indicating the contact persons. 

3. At 2pm a meeting between the various representatives was held by Laza
in which the beam sharing was discussed:

 3.1 Laza's summary.

 Summary of discussions about the use of H2 beam during the 
 period Oct. 5-11th

 Present: Tsesmelis, Reithler, Geurts, Hauser, Zotto, Karjavine,
 De Barbaro, Mans, Lazic etc.

 Major participants and their individual requirements:   

  - CSC: energy scan with muons, high intensity for 1-2h;
  - DT: track finding algorithm, energy scan with muons;
  - HCAL: energy scans between 10 and 30 GeV in HB and HE (require up
         to two shifts) 
  - RPC: unknown requirements, expect the electronics installation on
         Saturday
 
 Combined HCAL/EMU test:
  - 150 GeV muons most of the time;   
  - energy scan of HE+ME1/1 with high energy pions
    (study of shower leakage in ME1/1)
  - study of ME1/1 operation in presence of Co60 source (0.5 shift?)

  The curent plan is to run muons at 150 GeV until Thursday Oct.
 7th afternoon. The HCAL will then start with pion energy scans  
 in HB that will eventually go down to 10 GeV. During the owl    
 shift a switch to pion energy scan of HE should take place.
 Sometimes during Friday morning shift the HE energy scan with
 muons should take place. By late Friday Oct 8th morning the beam
 should be switched back to 150 GeV mouns and the requests for
 new data sets reviewed during the daily meeting.


4.  For EMU, our main goals this week are to continue testing the new
DDU/DCC, the RAT boards and integrate our DAQ and runcontrol with
HCAL's.

 4.1 Read out of the new DDU is the de-facto standard, although we still
see some level of data corruption which may hint to a (software)
driver issue. For tomorrow, Wednesday, higher beam intensities are
requested to further test the DDU and DCC S-Link readout.

 4.2  After the EMU DAQ column got successully resurrected a major step
forward was accomplished in uniting the readout of EMU and HCAL and
the first 8 events got logged. See this entry:

http://pcephc356.cern.ch:8000/~daq/runEntryDetails.php?Runno=600&Runseqid=h2-slice

 Although no strong conclusions can be drawn yet from only 8 events,
the difference between BXN remains stable which is good.

 4.3 The EMU runcontrol software framework  was also set up again, 
although we still have to adapt it to the (somewhat changed) xdaq 
environment developed at the Rice workshop and deployed at CERN.

 4.4 Also, in the very near future we hope to see the SP readout getting
integrated with the EMU readout (and thus with HCAL).


-Frank