sc_td

sc_td is a piece of software developed for reading SCAMP data. It has been frequently updated since it’s initial creation in 1991.

sc_td performs the following functions:

• Split multi-beam data into seperate files.
• Kill flagged frequency channels.
• Extract header information for each beam.

sc_td produces a set of output files for each beam in the file:

• *.dat contains the raw data for that beam, in the datfile format.
• *.hdr contains the coresponding header information for the beam.
• *.ascu contains the ‘bookkeeping’ information.

Killing channels

Different versions of sc_td have been known to do the channel killing differently. Early versions read the given name of the file and used this to look up in a kill.chans file. Later versions used a -K switch to specify the channels to kill (and in fact may fail if the -K switch is not provided). The Parkes/Epping version of the software uses a global kill.chans file, whereas the version at JBO searches the current working directory for the kill.chans file.

The kill.chans file is a list of the Tape name followed by the centre frequency, and the channel offset. Then there is a list of channels to kill, with each line terminated by the value −1.

For example

PM0001 1515 −3.0 5 6 7 8 25 27 94 −1