Controlling two recorders serially

[wehimwich]

In #153, @vlbi-jun-yang wrote:

At the end of this year, each EVN station is supposed to get a second Flexbuff to double the available disk space. While, I am afraid that the goal might not be reached for various reasons at some stations.

These Flexbuffs are supposed to be used serially for the normal VLBI observations with DBBC2. It is better to use a script to change the recorder. This script will help us to edit the control file mk5ad.ctl, run the command "fila10g=destination ..." and then restart FS.

[wehimwich]

With a fairly modest change (to allow rerunning mk5cn in initialization mode), it should be possible to trigger changing to a different recorder while the FS is running. Of course this should not be done while the current recorder is recording. This mechanism can be used by the script you mention.

Would it be useful to have this triggered automatically by the schedule? If so, we could consider ways of doing that.

[vlbi-jun-yang]

If FS provides a new feature to re-initialize mk5cn without restarting FS, it would be great. This may be also served as an extension of mk5relink. If we need to change the recorder, I will put the script in the procedure sched_initi, which has been re-defined to initilize some local equipments in the experiement prc file at Onsala. So, this change will be automatically done.