| Description: | While engineers are actively working on upgrading the station electronics, the commissioning team is simultaneously developing procedures to efficiently commission them. As each station is deployed, statistics are automatically ingested into a central database. A key part of the commissioning process is the ability to continuously monitor station stability. To support this, the commissioning team has developed a set of diagnostic plots generated directly from the database statistics. The movie presented here is a time-lapse compilation of Beamlet Statistic (BST) plots, showing beamlet number (which corresponds to frequency) as a function of time over the course of a full day on July 2, 2025. Each frame in the movie represents one hour of Low Band Antenna (LBA) observations recorded at station CS001. The video captures a variety of atmospheric and observational conditions, essentially representing “all seasons in one day.” Noteworthy features include ionospheric scintillation at the beginning of the day, followed by quiet ionospheric conditions with low RFI in the early morning hours, and a solar radio burst at 09:10 UTC. Later in the day, around 14:25 UTC, lightning activity is visible as narrow vertical stripe-like features. The creation of these diagnostic tools is the result of collaborative contributions from multiple dedicated members of the commissioning team, reflecting the strong team spirit driving the LOFAR2.0 commissioning efforts. |
