The SPTpol receiver camera is cold, and we are doing on-the-ground tests to make sure all our improvements for our second observing season are working. So far things are looking great. We we are cycling our He3 fridge successfully, and the loading on it is reduced / improved as inspected, due to some clever re-arranging of our infrared / heat blocking filters. The new NIST 150 GHz detector module is working great, the readout and detector yield looks better than ever, new robust readout electronics algorithms are working great, and we have some early indications that our efforts to improve the detector band-width are working. We have probably another ~5 days of tests of the receiver on the ground, not in the telescope, and it should be ready to go back on.
In parallel, Erik is leading a crew (Josh, Ryan, Don) working on the co-moving ground shield extension for the telescope, designed to reduce ground pickup at the level we need for our polarization measurements of the cosmic microwave background. Over the last 10 days, work has progressing rapidly, and it should be ready by Christmas!