Right now the following people are working on this project:

Julie Rolla, Cade Sbrocco, Scott Janse, Alex Patton, Eliot Ferstl, Abassi Brown, Evelyn Shank, Sophie Dunlap

Today we met for our first working meeting. Scott, Alex, and Eliot were asked to speed up and optimize AraSim. Sophie and Evelyn are working on editing the .csv file with the beam patterns coming out of XF. Currently it's written in a different format than AraSim takes in. Abassi is helping Evelyn and Sophie by giving them a sample program helping reorganize the cells in a .csv file. Since there's confusion on how to optimize AraSim, we've started dissecting the software so we can understand how it works. The following are questions on the setup.txt document. 

Setup.txt

What is "timestep"? Could we increase the timestep? Is this timestep big or small compared to 2 GHz?

Answer: Timestep is the unit of discrete time the computer operates at. The timestep by default is set to 2 GHz, or 5 * 10^-10 seconds. We might be able to make up some cheap time by lowering that but would have to check if it makes the data less accurate.

What is "TRIG_WINDOW"? Is this a "coincidence"? Meaning if this signal is picked up within a certain time between stations it's considered the same event?

What is "V_MIMIC_MODE"? Comments in Setup.CC says "// default : 0 - write out all chs where global triggered bin is center of the window"

Answer: Not sure exactly what it does but we can't change it from default as the other values are for the test bed mode only.

Random Question from Setup.txt, but relevant for other things. What is "testbed mode"? Answer: The "testbed" is the original test station only 40m under. This mode is for if we do detector=3 in the first part of the setup.txt file; thus, we won't use this. 

What's the difference between "DETECTOR" and "DETECTOR_SIMULATION"? We found "DETECTOR_STATION" in Settings.h. The comments say "// for DETECTOR=4, indicates the single station to be simulated // 0 = testbed, 1 = A1, 2 = A2, 3 = A3"

In this file, there's an ANTENNA_MODE variable. You can look at what it does in Settings.h. In this file, it says that you can decide whether to use a bicone antenna response or "a different response for the top vpol antennas". How does this function work? What does it mean by "top vpol antennas"? Someone should look up the ARA antennas, and look into this function. 

Our goal is to meet and work as a group twice a week. Collaboration in work should help us progress faster.