Giles, Everything is swell here. There appears to be no problem with the computer control. I have been unable to reproduce the problem Jeff had. I did notice that the elevation fast relay was tripped and that could have been why the drive did not enable. It could have been tripped if someone forgot to turn on the power supply for the elevation brake release. Anyway, the fast relays are great and the telescope is a lot safer with them in there. The telescope appears to be fully functional. We are just now putting it through its paces. The snow cover are doing a great job and it turns really smoothly. We have the chopper back on the telescope and are observing at this moment. The dual encoder readout is working well so far. For the last 3 days (before we started doing ACBAR observations) we have been running a 3Hz 1 degree square wave chop, just to see if we can break the chopper. So far, it is holding up well. No problems with coils getting too hot out there, even though it has been particularly warm. We just finished leveling the telescope. We think we have it to within an arcminute or so. We are now checking the pointing on some galactic sources to make sure there is nothing funny there. The new heater system seems to be working fine. The excess, noise in the AD590 readouts has been eliminated with the new boards and the analog control seems very reliable. Martin is still working on his software for the digital control; so far it looks pretty good. We have few more tests to do to make sure it is bombproof. It seems likely that you should have a fully functional telescope as soon as you are ready for it. until soon, -WLH > Hi > > Hua-bai, Paolo, and I are in Chch. We were originally supposed to fly to > McMurdo today (Jan. 3) but flight postponed to 1/4 due to weather. > > Bill, how is it going at Pole with the Viper upgrades? Also, is the > computer control of Viper's az and el drives now up and running again? Did > you figure out what was the problem that Jeff was having? Well, drop me a > quick note. > > cheers, > Giles >