[daip] Problem with VLBA data tape

[Jim Ulvestad]

Alan, we need a copy of your FITLD inputs, and also it would help
to give us the results of IMHEAD on a couple of your files that
would not concatenate.  (You may be asked for more, but people
are at lunch now, so we might as well get started.)

Please reply to daip at nrao.edu.

Cheers,

Jim

Alan Marscher wrote:
> 
> Sorry to use the shotgun approach, but I'm not sure to whom to
> address this question.
> 
> We are having trouble loading the files (using FITLD in AIPS, version
> 31DEC99) from the data tape for observation BG099, 29 June 2000.  The files
> have a lot of new tables, presumably for automatic calibration,
> but some of these must be incompatible since 'DOCONCAT' doesn't
> work.  So, we get a separate file for each UT section.  One anomaly
> is that the UT table (which I've never seen before) has a different
> version number for each section of data on the tape.  Furthermore,
> the frequency numbers for the different sections correspond to
> different frequencies.
> 
> Jose Luis reports that he encountered this error once before for
> another data set.  So, either it occurs occasionally or occurred
> over some finite period of time.  We don't have the problem for
> a data tape written in late 2000 for an observation on 1 Oct 2000.
> So, it's not a matter of having too old a version of AIPS.
> 
> Of course, it's possible to deal with this with a lot of patience
> (running DBCON, etc., on each file) and a lot of disk space.  But
> it seems like a waste.  I suspect that it was caused by an error
> at NRAO when writing the data tape.  If so, then it would be best
> from our viewpoint if NRAO would write and send us another data tape.
> (Please send it to Alan Marscher at Boston University rather than
> to Jose Luis Gomez in Spain.)
> 
> Please advise.
> 
> Thanks very much,
> Al Marscher, Jose Luis Gomez, and Svetlana Jorstad