Interacting with radio telescopes in real-time during VLBI sessions using e-control

In times of e-VLBI, a live monitoring of system states or syst em health and a dedicated control access by session schedulers can increase the efficiency of o bservations. At the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell a software extension to the existing NASA Fi eld System has been developed for remote control of telescope observations in cooperation wi th the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. It uses the principle of a remotely access ible, autonomous process cell as server extension to the Field System. The communication is r ealized also for low transfer rates on the basis of Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and uses generat ive programming with the interface software generator idl2rpc.pl developed at Wettzell. The user interacts with this system over a modern graphical user interface realized with wxWidgets. For security reasons the communication is automatically tunneled through a Secure Shell ( SSH) session to the telescope. After successful test observations with the telescopes at O’Higg ins, Concepción, and Wettzell and while it is already regularly used at Wettzell, future developmen ts for safe and secure authentication and user role management procedures will be realized within the upcoming NEXPRES project.