Chair: John Payne and Wolfgang Wild
Attendees: Belitsky (OSO), Cunningham (HIA), Ellison (RAL), Harmen (RAL), Napier (NRAO), Payne (NRAO), Plambeck (BIMA), Rafal (NRAO), Wade (ESO), Webber (NRAO), Wild (NOVA/SRON) White (NRAO)
Antenna/Receiver meeting was held last week. The group defined a new interface, taking into account information from both contractors. Anderson made an updated drawing. A new ICD will be released soon.
Photonics meeting will be held in Duisberg September 01.
There will be a section on SIS devices September 18 during the Virginia Beach Applied Superconductivity Conference. An agenda for the side meeting will be sent out shortly.
Ishiguro has initiated a photonics meeting to be held in Japan in early November 2000.
There have been ongoing talks about optics, dewars, etc., among the groups.
The goal of the Cambridge Meeting is to take necessary position to allow receiver design to proceed. Payne and Wild will send out final agenda on Friday. Agenda includes:
No additional agenda items were suggested. Suggestion on ways to make the meeting more productive included having the decision making discussion be a closed session to committee members and management. There are several options the committee is researching: consensus, majority vote, or combination of these. Rafal stated that the preferred choice of decision making is via consensus. However, the group should be aware that not all members are going to agree. And if a consensus cannot be achieved, the decision comes to Payne and Wild. Rafal suggested that the majority vote option should not be used.
Napier reports that any of the current approaches to the optics concept, clearly causes polarization problems. Napier want a clear requirement in the receiver specification on this issue. So far there is no real specification on polarization. For the specification Napier suggest keeping the beam width down to 1%. Napier went into a discussion on the need for polarization and explanation of the issues at hand. Members should review ALMA Memo 104 by Thompson to get full explanation of the issues and complexity involved.
The WVR report sent out by Wade will be updated shortly. A complete version (less financial proposal) including updated technical specifications from Onsala will be re-circulated.
The next JRDG Teleconference will be September 28 at 1500 UT.
Minutes recorded and submitted by Carolyn White