On shift:  Todd Pedlar, Giovanni Lasio

Data taking at Ecm = 3629.6 peak in search of etacp.

Good night! what a frustrating shift.  Some data were taken,
but rather slowly at times due to DAQ problems, which are so far not
completely understood.  

Deceleration before the shift began went smoothly;  midway
during the first run (883) we began to see frequent live-time
dips, below 90%, for short periods of time (10-20 sec) after
which the live time would return to normal. These fluctuations
were tied to fluctuations of 5% or more in the gas jet density.
We lowered the set point density of the gas jet in an attempt to
alleviate this problem.  We thought perhaps it was related to 
the straws, as the straws tripped off several times during these
live time dips.  The thresholds are and have been set properly 
the whole time.   

We ran most of the night below 2.0 x 10^31.  Higher luminosity
wasn't possible without continuously bad livetime.

Several times during the night these fluctuations caused the PRUDE 
filters to die, either one by one, or in one case, all at once. 

On a couple of occasions, the livetime went to zero.  Pressing 
Reset fixed this, until the last humdinger of a DAQ death.  At that
time, pressing Reset was worthless.  PRUDE 0 reported hundreds of
the following errors:

Expected ADC header word: DYC 1; last good vsn 0; 1004
Out of order ADC channel: DYC 1; current vsn 4, last channel 4; 1004

Neither of us could figure out what had happened, but an abort
and new run got things moving.  This is where we stand now.
  
Run 883:  145.0 pb^-1
Run 884:   21.5 pb^-1 (aborted when PRUDE filters all died)
Run 885:   63.3 pb^-1 (aborted when 3 of 4 PRUDE filters had died)
Run 886:   41.4 pb^-1 (aborted when all hell broke loose)
Run 887:   72.9 pb^-1 (aborted when all PRUDEs died)

Run 888:  about to start ... Keith is still diagnosing the problem.

Here's wishing better shifts to all -

Todd and Giovanni

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Todd K. Pedlar   -  Northwestern University - FNAL E835
Nuclear & Particle Physics Group
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Phone:  (847) 491-8630  (708) 840-8048  Fax: (847) 491-8627
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WWW:	http://numep1.phys.nwu.edu/tkp.html
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