The Principle Coordinator's laboratory is fully equipped for Resistive
Plate Chamber (RPC) prototyping and characterisation. The infrastructure
includes a four-line gas mixing and distribution system, a Cosmic ray muon
telescope, NIM/CAMAC based readout and data acquisition systems. Various
jigs and tools that help in ascertaining the quality of raw materials as
well as various fabrication stages of the RPCs are also available.  These
are routinely used in the lab for RPC electrode preparation and coating,
measurement of its resistivity, assembly of RPCs, leak testing of
assembled RPCs etc.

The gas mixing is capable of mixing four individual gas components and
control the mixed gas flow through the detector chambers. The mixing unit
has provision either to flow the mixed gas directly into the detector
chambers or to store in a pre-mix gas cylinder for a later use. A
microcontroller based gas bubble counter is mounted on the output gas line
of the chamber for monitoring the gas flow rate through the chamber along
with a differential pressure gauge.

The Cosmic Ray muon telescope is designed using six scintillator paddles. 
The telescope allows setting up of a well formed windows for Cosmic ray 
muons using combination of large and finger-like paddles. Veto paddles are 
used to fine tune the geometry of the telescope. Front-end electronics and 
logic circuits comprising of NIM modules generate the muon trigger signal.

A suitable telescope support structure has been designed and built
employing light-weight aluminum extruded channels. This allows us to
quickly and accurately rearrange the telescope to meet day to day
requirements based on the type of study that we want to perform. Provision
has also been made to align the paddles and the RPC under test using a
laser pointer for a better geometry alignment.

A data acquisition system, which has been designed and developed using NIM
and CAMAC electronics is available in the laboratory for RPC
characterisation. A certain level of redundancy was built into the data
acquisition system, in order to monitor the stability of the Cosmic ray
muon telescope as well as for acquisition of various test parameters from
the RPC under test in parallel. The telescope monitor system could also be
used as a backup for the RPC test system.

The telescope monitor and RPC data acquisition CAMAC crates are
individually controlled by dedicated PC hosts, in which the on-line data
acquisition system software run. The data collected by the online systems
is analysed using standard physics analysis software packages such as PAW
and ROOT. Apart from this, various slow monitor parameters such as ambient
temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, gas flow into the
RPC, applied high voltage, chamber current etc are also recorded so that
we can easily correlate various results or problems with observations.

Other facilities include a VME data acquisition system, which is being 
setup, fast oscilloscopes, function generators, all other necessary test 
and measurement equipments such as NIM, CAMAC, VME modules, high voltage 
power supplies etc.

The computing facilities in the PC's lab include a Montecarlo simulations' 
farm comprising of about 80 nodes.