The description below assumes that the experiment is called ds001 and that it's running on the Katherine 12m (station ID Katherine). It is also assumed that the Dynamic Observing Scripts are installed in /home/oper/bin/dysched

It's recommended that this software is run from a VNC session but it can also be run on the desktop. For the example given here, a VNC session is shown.

1. Start the PC field system software as usual.
2. In a terminal window, start ds_redbutton.pl and test that you can communicate with the server and send an antenna available/not available status.
   1. A log of activity from ds_redbutton.pl is kept in /usr2/log/ds_allow_*.log
3. In a new terminal window, start the main dynamic observing script dysched.pl with the name of the experiment and the station ID:
   1. cd ~/bin/dysched
   2. ./dysched.pl ds001 ke
4. You will be asked if you want to continue as any current schedule will be stopped.
   1. The software will copy the default schedule ds.snp to ds001ke.snp
   2. The software will then copy the default procedure file ds.prc to ds001ke.prc
   3. The schedule file is then appended with two lines. The first one sets a wait time 70 seconds into the future, and the last one tells the schedule to call itself starting on the next line (which will be the first line of the first piece of new schedule to be downloaded from the server).
   4. dysched.pl then starts the schedule from line 1.
5. The software will now go into a loop, executing the following steps every minute:
   1. Check the override status (as written by ds_redbutton.pl) in override.txt. If the antenna is available, then the following steps are taken:
      1. The web page containing the name of the current new schedule is checked and it's start time is read.
      2. If the new schedule piece occurs after the end of the current schedule, then the new piece is downloaded from the server, and DynamicSnap.sh is run to call Drudg and append a new piece of SNP file onto the schedule.
   2. If the antenna is available or not, dysched.pl now checks to see if the schedule is about to expire or not. If it is, a halt command is sent, otherwise a cont.
6. dysched.pl can be stopped at any time by typing Control-C in the terminal window or by killing the process

By default, the station status information is available from the Dynamic Observing station status page and the schedule status is available at the dynamic scheduling status page (the last line lists the most recent schedule).

Below is a screenshot of a dynamic scheduling session running at Katherine.