radio-observer

This README is for version 0.5rc1.

Radioastronomy utility. For more information, see the MLAB wiki.

branch	status
master
dev

Table of Contents

• Compilation
• Configuration
• Usage
• Output Format
• ChangeLog

Compilation

1. Install the following libraries:

   • libfftw3 (http://www.fftw.org/download.html)
   • cfitsio (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/)
   • JACK (http://jackaudio.org/download)

   On a debian system (Ubuntu), they can by installed using:

    $ sudo apt-get install libfftw3-dev libcfitsio-dev libjack-jackd2-dev clang
   

2. Clone the repository using (for instance): git clone https://github.com/MLAB-project/radio-observer.git.

3. Checkout and build the cppapp submodule:

    $ git submodule init
    $ git submodule update
    $ cd cppapp
    $ make
   

4. In the radio-observer directory, run make. The resulting binary, named radio-observer, should appear in the project's root directory.

    $ cd ..
    $ make
   

5. If anything goes wrong, please send me an email with the output at [email protected].

Configuration

The program attempts to read a config file in the user's home directory called .radio-observer.json. Example config file is stored in radio-observer/radio-observer.json. You can copy it to your home directory and edit as you like ($ mv radio-observer.json $HOME/.radio-observer.json).

Usage

$ radio-observer [-v] [-c CONFIG_FILE] [WAV_FILE]

• -v prints out program version and exits
• -c CONFIG_FILE makes the program use config file CONFIG_FILE rather than the default ($HOME/.radio-observer.json)
• WAF_FILE makes the program read input from WAV file WAF_FILE rather than JACK

Without the WAV_FILE argument, radio-observer attempts to connect to a jack server and then listen forever to the data sent by Jack. If WAV_FILE is specifed, radio-observer uses WAV frontend, reads the WAV file and exits. In either case, the program stores the resulting data in a series of FITS files (snapshots) in its current working directory (the directory from which you run the program).

Currently, the format of the snapshot file name is snapshot_LOCATION_YEAR_MM_DD_HH_mm_ss.fits, where LOCATION is the value of the location configuration option, YEAR is a four-digit year, MM is two-digit month, DD two-digit day and so on.

Despite there being a log_file configuration option, the log is currently written only to the stderr. To append it to a file, do output redirection ($ radio-observer 2> your_log_file.log).

Fits file handling: FITS can be converted in png by fits2png script. sudo apt-get install python-pyfits

Output Format

Snapshot and Meteor FFT FITS Files

FFT FITS files have frequency on X-axis and time on Y-axis. Important FITS headers are:

• DATE - This is the time the FITS file was written.
• DATE_OBS - Time of the beggining of the file. In other words, this is the time of the first FFT row in the file.
• CRVAL2 - Unix time of the first FFT row in milliseconds since Unix epoch.
• CDELT2 - Time difference between two consequtive FFT rows in milliseconds.
• CRVAL1 - Frequency of the leftmost pixel in a row.
• CDELT1 - Frequency difference between two neighbouring pixels in a FFT row.

ChangeLog

See CHANGELOG.md.