I/CCERA were invited to participate in a "Hack A Thon" at the ATA/HCRO,
operated by the SETI Institute.  The event took place on the weekend
of October 2-4, 2020.

The ATA had recently purchased two USRP N32x radios, and were interested
in community involvement in helping to realize their capabilities.

My goals for the weekend were just to help out where I could, and
perhaps test my pulsar signal processing chain using one of the
antennae in the array.

During the course of the weekend, I did 3 trial observations using my
"stupid_simple_pulsar" tool, and the 3rd try was a complete success:

http://www.ccera.ca/files/j0332+5434.png

Two of the trials were failures, which were due to misunderstanding of
the configuration of the array and multiplexors.

If I have any complaint about the way things unfolded (and, to be clear
I'm not actually complaining in any real sense), it is that there was
confusion about the configurations, and a better document could have 
helped folks waste less time.

Coordination via the Matrix chat channel turned out to be more useful
than I had predicted, and very few actual scheduling conflicts occurred.
Clearly, if this is to be a regular thing then resource scheduling
needs to be addressed.  It's rather remarkable that despite the lack
of tools, and the gnarly multi-dimensional scheduling problem
(hardware resources, sky objects, observers in different timezones), it
all mostly "worked".

During the event, I was able to install TEMPO2 on the "gnuradio1"
server machine, as well as "dc" -- most of y'all are too young to
remember that little rpn calculator tool, but I still use it all the time.

I used VNC to access "gnuradio1", but was forced to use an XFCE4
desktop, since the other desktops wouldn't work under VNC.  I plan to
install MATE and see if that works.

The process of testing my "stupid_simple_pulsar" code revealed some
issues that I fixed during the course of the weekend, and also
revealed some inadequacies in the GR 3.9 support of older flow-graphs
from the GR 3.7 universe.

I also developed an ATA-specific "wrapper" for my pulsar code that can
make running an observation easier.

The code is available at:

https://github.com/ccera-astro/stupid_simple_pulsar
https://github.com/ccera-astro/run_ata_pulsar

My plan is to learn how to use TEMPO2 and update the
ATA "wrapper" to call out to TEMPO2 to get a current timing
estimate prior to starting the observing run.

Best
Marcus Leech

President, Canadian Centre for Experimental Radio Astronomy
http://www.ccera.ca