[daip] [!9991]: AIPS - FITLD of VLBA files to maintain Antennas

[Tracy Clarke]

Tracy Clarke updated #9991
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FITLD of VLBA files to maintain Antennas
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           Ticket ID: 9991
                 URL: https://help.nrao.edu/staff/index.php?/Tickets/Ticket/View/9991
           Full Name: Tracy Clarke
               Email: tracy.clarke at nrl.navy.mil
             Creator: User
          Department: AIPS Data Reduction
       Staff (Owner): -- Unassigned --
                Type: Issue
              Status: Open
            Priority: Default
                 SLA: NRAO E2E
      Template Group: Default
             Created: 07 March 2017 01:34 AM
             Updated: 07 March 2017 01:34 AM
                 Due: 09 March 2017 01:34 AM (2d 0h 0m)
      Resolution Due: 15 March 2017 01:34 AM (8d 0h 0m)



Hi,

VLITE works much like the VLBA with the DiFX correlator. We process data over 24 hour chunks and often have antennas coming in and out during periods so do not always have our full 10 antennas. We currently use an Obit task IDIIn to load the data. Using this we find that antennas are renumbered to always be from 1-N where N is the total number. This means if we lose one antenna (e.g. our 3rd antenna) then all those after it get renumbered down one so it fills all the slots. This is not a great behavior since it means we end up creating a new file with a new antenna table if one antenna changes. We looked into using the FITLD task and setting the antenna names as V0-V9 with ANTNAME. Our desired behavior is that as we load scans over the 24 hours of time, if there are no changes in antenna pads all data sets would load into a single file with V0-V9 in the antenna table. In practice, reading the documentation and testing, we have found that the antenna names are ignored if we are concatenating files into a pre-existing file. Is there any work around so that it would always place V0-V9 into the exact places even if we are concatenating so that the ANTNAME is no ignored? 

Thanks,

Tracy

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