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Disk based recordings update (important information below)

From: <cwest_at_email.protected>
Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 11:14:34 +1100 (EST)

Hi all,

I trust you are all nicely tucked away at your telescopes ready for the
fun to begin...

For the vt001h observation I would like to use the "dstart" command to
launch the recorders. Hopefully each telescope will get a chance during
vt002a to practice driving the new "vsib_record" program which replaces
the old method of doing this (for those that know the old method, that
program was called "wr").

Chris Phillips has put a webpage up that has the software and some
information that is needed to do these new disk based recordings.
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/evlbi/download.html

Over the coming weeks Chris and I hope to get this all into a "safe" cvs
repository so that people can update the software easily and be sure of
having the right versions of things.

IMPORTANT:
----------

One thing that is not detailed yet is the usage of a nifty little program
called "dstart". This program is used to monitor the time and start the
"vsib_record" program exactly when required. This will help me with the
correlating of the data later. However, it is not necessary and if anyone
has problems then we will skip this and start the recorder manually.

Firstly can people please ensure the clocks on their computers (the ones
doing the recording) are up to date. If you need help let me know ASAP.
These clocks can be corrected for, but its nicer to start things on time.

Ok, to use this program all you do is type:

The usage is simple:
        dstart YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS ; "command to run"

>> dstart 2004-11-15T08:00:00 ; vsib_record ....

That would start the recording at 08:00:00 on the 15th of Nov 2004

Due to timezone differences I'd recommend trying to use "UTC" to start the
recorders. If you type one of the lines below before trying to start the
"dstart" program it should launch correctly. You only need to type this
once per session. You can check that dstart is telling you the right time
to start things by watching what it prints to the screen.

tcsh > setenv TZ UTC
bash > export TZ=UTC

Lets give it a try to ensure things are working for people. You may need
to specify a path to "dstart" if it is not in a default path already. You
will also need to set the arugment being passed to dstart. Set the time to
be a minute or so in the future.

>> dstart 2004-11-15T00:00:00 ; date

That should show you the time (in UTC) that you program would have
launched. Which in my example was 0 hours on 15th Nov 2004.
If everything works ok, then send me an email to let me know you are right
to go with the dstart command. I will send instructions later about the
options to use for "vsib_record".

If you would like to know the UTC time, you can type "date -u" at a
command prompt. However, if you have already set the TZ environment
variable, it will tell you the UTC time already (Timezone information is
printed when you type date).

Cheers
Craig...
---
Craig West
SKA Research Assistant
Astrophysics and Supercomputing
Swinburne University of Technology
Australia
Phone: +61 3 9214 5244
Fax  : +61 3 9214 8797
Received on 2004-11-15 11:14:51