ChannelAvgTask

ChannelAvgTask averages given number of consecutive spectral channels to reduce the spectral resolution of the processed data chunk. Flagging is taken into account. By default, the resulting data point is only flagged if all contributing spectral channels are flagged. Otherwise, the sample is considered to be valid. But there is an optional threshold parameter to alter this behaviour (and flag the resulting visibility data point which otherwise would remain unflagged). The resulting frequency is always the average of contibuting frequencies regardless of the flag status. No handling of noise estimate is done at this stage.

Configuration Parameters

The program requires a configuration file be provided on the command line. This section describes the valid parameters. In addition to mandatory parameters which are always required, individual tasks often have specific parameters which need to be defined only if a particular task is used. As for all tasks, parameters are taken from keys with tasks.name.params prefix (not shown in the table below) where name is an arbitrary name assigned to this task and used in tasklist (this allows us to run the same task more than once with different parameters. The type of the task defined by tasks.name.type should be set to ChannelAvgTask.

Parameter

Type

Default

Description

averaging

unsigned int

None

Averaging factor, i.e. the number of consecutive spectral channels to average. The total number of channels in the chunk should be integral multiple of this number.

avgflagged

boolean

false

If true, fully flagged set of channels will also be averaged (note, the resulting visibility sample will still be flagged). Otherwise, the fully flagged input (of the group of channels determined by the averaging parameter) will translate into zero visibility (but also flagged).

threshold

unsigned int

1

The minimum number of good (i.e. unflagged) channels to contribute to averaging for the result to be unflagged. By default, even a single good channel results in a valid visibility post-averaging. Note, setting this parameter to a value larger than averaging would result in all data being flagged

Example

########################## ChannelAvgTask ##############################

tasks.tasklist = [MergedSource, Merge, CalcUVWTask, FringeRotationTask, ChanAvgTask, MSSink, AvgForMonitoring, TCPSink]

# note we use two different task names for the same task to enable averaging with different factors.

# number of channels to average, if input is 16416 we get 304 channels after this task (will be passed to MSSink)
tasks.ChanAvgTask.params.averaging = 54
# type of the task
tasks.ChanAvgTask.type = ChannelAvgTask

# number of channels to average, if input is 304 we get 19 channels after this task (will be passed to TCPSink)
tasks.AvgForMonitoring.params.averaging = 16
# type of the task
tasks.AvgForMonitoring.type = ChannelAvgTask