Westerbork VLBI  report for the TOG in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands at 28 Januari 2011 
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Regular Session Participation:

        Westerbork participated in the M,C and L-band experiments of
        session 2010-2 and 2010-3.  Observing was successful. FTP
        fringe files were produced by the system, and fringes were
        found on all occasions.

        Severe RFI on 1610-1634 MHz, gave us again a hard time to
        phase up the array for that frequency.  The TuneUp software
        for the tied array is again improved to deal with this
        problem, and it is now also possible to use a program that
        uses the receiver noise sources to phase up the array, giving
        us more flexibility.

        There were some backend related problems. We lost about 1.5
        hours recording time.



e-VLBI: 
        In general Westerbork performed well.  
        In the night of 10/11 July 2010, there was a heavy
	thunderstorm at the WSRT site.  Several telescopes, and the
	backend were damaged by lightning strike.  We lost about 6
	hours of one eVLBI project (RR004B).

        

Tied Array: 

	Our digital tied array hardware (TADUmax) worked fine.
        It was used both for single dish (RT7), and the tied array
        (RT01234.6789abcd).


Field System:

        After 5 years of duty our FS PC died, just after session
        2010-2 For session 2010-3 we used our spare FS PC (Transtec +
        Pentium 4 on 1.8GHz) It is now replaced by a Transtec SENYO
        860 PC + duo processor E8500 on 3.16 GHz Session 2010-2 was
        done with FSL7 (Etch) + FS-9.10.3, and SDK8.1 for the Mark5B
        Session 2010-3 was done with FSL8 (Lenny)+ FS-9.10.4, and
        SDK8.2 for the Mark5B
       

Mark5B: 
        After session 2010-2, we upgraded our Mark5B to SDK8.2.  

        During the upgrade procedure we ran into a problem, that was
        solved by JIVE staff (Paul Boven).  This problem,(in the
        Haystack upgrade package for Mark5B), was mailed to Chester
        Ruszczyk.

        Both sessions were recorded on pata diskpacks.

        Current versions:
        DIMINO   : Mark5B DIM : 2007y222d04h : 1 : mark5-XX : 1 : 1 : 2.7x : 0x1b : 0x5bdb
        Linux    : Etch  2.6.18-6-686:(Debian 2.6.18.dfsg.1-26etch2) 
        Firmware : 12.06


Other: 

      It was discovered that the receiver radomes of all our
      telescopes contained water, resulting in an increased Tsys over
      the last few years.

      After replacing all the radomes, this summer, we achieved a much
      better S/N. (25% confirmed by Jive during the FTP tests)
     

Personnel: 

     At the end of 2010, Nicolas Pradel has left ASTRON, and started a
     new job at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics of
     Academia Sinica (ASIAA), Taiwan (pradel@asiaa.sinica.edu.tw).



Geert Kuper, Nicolas Pradel