The 2003 September 18 release of Sched is now available at the AOC and
on ftp.aoc.nrao.edu anonymous ftp site in directory pub/sched.

There have been various bug fixes and enhancements.  Most are
described in the manual section on the release.

Some of the more significant changes are:

Proper motion and paralax were added.  This addition required some
terminology changes and one variable name change to conform to proper
astronomical usage.  First, the station catalog parameter EPOCH was
changed to EQUINOX.  This is the variable that gives J2000, B1950, or
DATE.  EPOCH was changed to mean the zero point of proper motion,
which is usually a date.  For backwards compatibility, if the argument
of EPOCH starts with a letter, and EQUINOX is not specified, EPOCH is
not set and EQUINOX is set to the argument given to EPOCH.

The other terminology issue concerns proper motion and planetary
motion.  What SCHED has had for a long time, and called proper motion,
is actually planetary motion.  These two are not fundamentally
different, but the magnitude of the motions can be very different.  If
the object motions are of order arcseconds per year and the zero time
is different from the observe time by years, use proper motion.
Usually such motions, along with paralax, come from the Hipparcos
catalog or some equivalent.  SCHED will take such motions and adjust
the source position accordingly, and then feed that modified position
to the stations.  It will also feed the rates as planetary motion
rates, but for some stations there are too few digits in fixed formats
to allow such rates to appear as anything but zero.  If you have much
faster rates, like for a planet or satellite, and a zero point during
or close to the observation time, use the planetary motion parameters.
In that case, SCHED does not adjust the source positions from what you
give it, but passes on the rates to the stations.

The slew time calculations now take into account the acceleration rate
of the antenna.  This can be especially important for the larger
antennas that don't necessarily get up to full speed during phase
referencing observations.

Much of what used to appear on the screen when running SCHED now
appears in a file called sched.runlog.  This both cleans up the
appearance when running the program and provides a record, which may
be especially useful when there are errors.

The high bandwidth, 1024 Mbps option for MarkIV was added.

Support of Mark5 obserations was added to the code, although much is
blocked except for test observations because the on-line systems are
not ready for the modified files.

The Socorro correlator maximum output data rate was increased to
1 Mbyte/s. 

The summary file now gives source separations for sources within
15 degrees of each other.

The 2002jul02 version of SCHED (yes it has been over a year) is
still available in the aoc under /users/cwalker/sched_2002jul02
and on the ftp site in files of the appropriate names.  Please 
use it only if you have problems with the new version.