A Summary of Beamline Operations with the A1200

1998 marked the last full year of operation with the A1200 fragment separator as part of the high-energy beam line system. Logs of this year show 80 beamline tunes of primary beam and 40 secondary beams, but not all such tunes were considered interesting enough to record. A one-word description of these activities is “routine”. What follows is a brief history of what was done to achieve routine operation. In 1991, beamline tunes were done essentially by hand with minimal software assistance. (An exception to this was the program “BOSS”, which controlled only the A1200 beamline segments). Predictions of optics codes were not in routine use and the principal tuning parameter was a “small spot” on the viewers. Long setup times (as long as 24 hours) and difficulty achieving the desired conditions on the experimental target indicated another approach was needed. A process was begun t o correct this situation, including the following measures: