During the first trip between March 24th and March 26th, the old control electronics were completely removed except for one PTS frequency synthesizer. Because the spacing of the new system was different from the old system, even the sliders on the rack needed to be taken off and moved. However, the installation of the new electronics went off without a hitch and the radar began to run after the first day of work. However, the next morning it was realized that the velocity sign of the data overnight was wrong and thus this data has been removed from distribution.

During the 2nd day of the installation trip, further tweaks and edits to the radar code in order to get the system working just right were performed. With the electronics working well, the next goal of performing calibrations on the main and interferometer array receive paths was started. Here we began from the "end" of the receive path where the RF signals are digitized by the computer and worked our way towards the antenna. At each set, and especially at points where the signal is mixed, we made sure that the output of the two receive paths was in phase. In the end, we ended up finding out that an additional length along the main array path due to the transmitters and interfacing cables from the transmitters to the phasing matrix required a certain time delay be applied to the final tdiff number. This tdiff number was erroneous recorded during this trip and so a second trip was taken on April 8th.

However, during the March trip, one last part of the tdiff needed to be reconfirmed as the time delays along the long coaxial cable runs between the building and the antennas had not been checked for several years. During this trip, measurements were taken, even though the correct way to calculate the time delay from these measurements wasn't known. A tip of the hat goes to Jef Spaleta at the University of Alaska Fairbanks for a refresher on how to calculate the time delay based off of frequency and phase measurements. During this trip as well, an additional transmitter that was repaired and inspected in the Blacksburg lab was returned to the site. Here it was found the the coaxial cables between the building and the antennas were on average 0.3088 microseconds shorter on the interferometer array than on the main array. This leads to a -0.3088 contribution to the final tdiff number.

During the April 8th trip, a problem was encountered right off the bat with the new electronics. It is believed that due to the way the electronics are arranged in the rack, the lone PTS frequency synthesizer has been overheating and at random time intervals shutting off. Upon arriving to the site on the 8th, the radar had not bee running properly for over 8 hours. Inspecting the frequency synthesizer though showed that the fuse had blown. A replacement fuse was installed and the radar began running normally shortly there after. As mentioned before, the goal of this trip was to re-measure the time delays in the electronics due to the transmitter and the transmitter-phasing matrix interfacing cable. Before this had been recorded as 5 nanoseconds, but during this trip it was measured using two different methods to be about 29.5 nanoseconds. So, it was found that the final tdiff number is -0.3088 - 0.0295 which is -0.338 microseconds. As mentioned before, this is the same measurement that was recorded during the July 2013 trip in which a new line was added to the hdw.dat.bks file.

Also during the April trip, a second method was used to reconfirmed the time delays along the coaxial cables between the building and the antennas. This method as well as the previous method came out with similar results, so both of these are to be trusted as good measurements.