STEP: A small EMC puzzle

Part 2: Searching for clues

The pattern repeats itself with a period of 1 sec., which corresponds to one pps cycle. For starters, let's see what happens if we cut down the PPSS table. We switched the unit into HK mode, which basically disables data product generation, and the following picture came up on the scope:

So this probably means that the cause of the spikes are the data products. If you look closely in the data product table of STEP, you can see that there are 3 science data products, and one "clear" data product to clear the memory, four in all. All get executed every second. The time between the largest spike and the first smaller spike is 300ms, exactly the time between the issuing of the "clear" DPS command and the "nominal science" DPS command in the PPSS table.

How can we confirm that?

Part 3: Playing around with the DPS table