These notes are all unpublished except here, or on a previous version of the PCA page, and are expected to be of historical interest only. The links are listed in reverse chronological order. There is no discernable meaning to the pcarmf version numbers, although they are monotonic. I apologize for the variety of the formats

RXTE/PCA Observations of the Crab Nebula, K. Jahoda, A. H. Rots, and A. J. Lyne 2000, poster presented at the November 2000 High Energy Astrophysics Division of the AAS meeting in Honolulu, HI (pdf)

Rossi 2000 workshop presentation. K. Jahoda (pdf)

Oct 2000, a bug in the effective area described, with workaround

Dec 1999, summary of pcarmf v7.01

Ftools v4.2 Summary prepared 1998-11-16.
Erratum to the Ftools v4.1 release 1998-08-28.

Matrix summaries up to August 1998

Summaries of meetings between 4/98 and 10/98 (leading up to ftools v4.2 release) on background model quality and applicability to faint sources

May 29, 1998
June 12, 1998

March 1998 of PCA calibration paper (pdf)

Three time constant models K. Jahoda 1998. An investigation of background rate prediction using a model with a constant term, a term proportional to VLE rate, and 3 terms proportional to recent SAA passages with time constants near 22, 225, and 6500 minutes. The L7 rate in the currently supported models implicitly contains the short and long time constant variability and an explicit term that models the medium time constant; the current (2004) VLE model explicitly includes the short and medium time constant variations.

12 Hour period in early background models. K. Jahoda 1998. Early background models introduced a spurious ~12 hour periodicity into long observations. This was traced to an design error in the construction of the models, eliminated in later efforts

Sept 1997 report to the RXTE Users' Committee

Ftools v3.6.1 pcarmf v2.02

Marck 1997 report to RXTE Users' Committee

"Recent Progress in Calibration of the RXTE/PCA" K. Jahoda and the PCA team, 1997, (pdf). Poster presented at the 189th meeting of the AAS, Toronto, ON.

bkgd_status_96.pdf A report from Nov 96 on the status of the Q6 models and position based activation models. The Q6 models took data from half the orbit; the activation models were made from the rest of the data after subtracting the Q6 model. I don't think the discontinuities at the edges were discussed here. There is some discussion of data screening. (pdf)

PCA Energy Response A discussion of the response generator, apparently by K. Jahoda and from ~12/1996 (pdf)