Basic Information on wblod

Task: wblod
Purpose: Convert an RPFITS file into Miriad uv format.
Categories: data transfer

WBLOD is a MIRIAD task, which converts a uv data-set from the RPFITS
format to Miriad format.  It is a clone of ATLOD intended for loading
wide-band analogue correlator data.

Key: in
Name of the input RPFITS files. Several names can be given -- wildcard
expansion is supported. If a single name is given, this can be a raw
tape device name (e.g. /dev/nrst0 in UNIX) containing several files.
In this case, see the NFILES keyword below. There is no default. 

Key: out
Name of the output Miriad uv data-set. No default.

Key: ifsel
IF number to select.  Default is all IFs.  For example,
if you observed with 5 GHz (frequency 1) and 8 GHz (frequency 2) 
simultaneously, IF 1 would be the 5 GHz data and IF 2 would 
be the 8 GHz data.

Key: restfreq
The rest frequency, in GHz, for line observations.  By default,
the value in the RPFITS file is used.  Giving a value for the
"restfreq" parameter overrides the RPFITS file value. If you
do set this parameter, you MUST give the same number of values as the
number of IFs written out. A value of 0 is used for a continuum
observation. For example, if you have two IFs, the first of
which is HI, and the second is continuum, use
    restfreq=1.420405752,0

Key: posout
Name of an output ascii file to contain a log of the antenna positions.
Format is MJD, antenna, RA (rad), DEC (rad).

Key: posin
Name of an input ascii file which contains the antenna positions.
Format is MJD, antenna, RA (rad), DEC (rad). If a filename is
given, the antenna positions in the rpfits file are ignored.
Usually this file will be that written by the posout parameter.
The advantage of this is that excessive interpolation is avoided
in cases where the antenna positions lag the correlator data.

Key: options
This gives extra processing options. Several can be given,
separated by comas.
  'birdie'  ATCA self-interference can corrupt channels at integral
            multiples of 128 MHz. The birdie option flags these
            channels. Additionally, in continuum (33 channels/128MHz)
            mode, the birdie option dicards every second channel, plus
            some edge channels. The channels discarded
            are those most likely affected by the self-interference.
            Discarding these channels does not have a
            sensitivity penalty, because the effective channel
            bandwidth is twice the channel separation.
  'reweight' Re-weight the lag spectrum to eliminate the "Gibbs" phenomena.
  'compress' Write output data in compressed format.
  'noauto'  Discard autocorrelation data. The default is to
            copy the autocorrelation data.
  'nocross' Discard cross-correlation data. The default is to
            copy the cross correlation data.
  'relax'   Do not flag visibilities based on SYSCAL information.
            The default is to flag visibilities if they have
            not been preceded by a valid SYSCAL record, or if the
            the values in the SYSCAL record look bad. SYSCAL
            values are checked for sampler statistics being within
            3% of 17.3%, or 0.5% of 50.0%, that the XY phase
            is within 10 degrees of its running median, and that
            the XY amplitudes are within 1 Jy or 10% of its running
            median.
  'unflag'  Save any data that is flagged. By default ATLOD
            discards most data that is flagged.
  'samcorr' Correct the pre-Dec93 data for incorrect sampler
            statistics. Since December 1993, sampler corrections
            are performed online -- Miriad ignores the samcorr
            option for this data.
  'xycorr'  Apply the on-line measurement of the XY phase.
  'hanning' Hanning smooth spectra and drop every other channel
            This option is ignored for 128-MHz, 33-channel data.
  'bary'    Use the barycentre as the velocity rest frame. The
            default is to use the LSR frame.
  'noif'    Do not map the simultaneous IFs to the IF axis.
            By default ATLOD attempts to map the simultaneous
            frequencies to the IF axis. This will not be possible
            if there are a different number of polarisations in
            the different IFs.
  'nopflag' If at least one polarisation of a set of 2 or 4 polarimetric
            spectra are bad, ATLOD normally flags all of the
            polarisations. Option nopflag changes this so that only
            the nominally bad spectrum is flagged.
  'hires'   Treat bin data as measurements in the high time resolution
            mode. The output dataset contains no bins, but instead
            appears as data measured with small cycle times.
  'pmps'    Undo `poor man's phase switching'. This is an obscure option
            that you should not generally use.
  'detail'  Give a more detailed error log when loading. 

Key: nfiles
This gives one or two numbers, being the number of files to skip,
followed by the number of files to process. This is only
useful when the input is a tape device containing multiple files.
The default is 0,1 (i.e. skip none, process 1 file).

NOTE: Using this feature to skip many files on a tape is VERY
inefficient. It is far faster to skip using operating system commands.
When doing this, however, you should be aware is that every RPFITS files
consists of 3 tape files. Thus you will want to skip three times as
many tape files as RPFITS files. For example, in UNIX, to skip 10
RPFITS files, use
            mt -f /dev/nrst0 fsf 30

Key: nscans
This gives one or two numbers, being the number of scans to skip,
followed by the number of scans to process. NOTE: This applies to
all files read. The default is to skip none and process all scans.

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