Table of contents
Datacheck procedure for Mark5B
The idea for this came from Jonathan Quick. He send me the mark5access package and some gnuplot scripts to look at DBBC data.
During testing and operation of the DBBC I often had to look at the data itself to verify that everything is okay. Usually I used the Mark5B tools from Haystack like bpcal, bstat, vlbi2 or vlbi0. Those work, but are mostly written for 2 Gbps PFB tests, or other 16 channel osbervations, and therefore can give confusing outputs when used with less channels. The mark5access package is much more felxible and can be used for all kind of data, from Mark5A, B, VLBA, or MarkIV formats.
With that on hand Jonathan had the idea to have some nearly online monitor of running experiments. Since the mark5access programs have to be called with the correct mode this was a bit complicated at the beginning. I tried to prepare scrits for the most common modes and attached those to each prc-file of an observation, but this needs an additional step after drudging and was not of much use for everybody.
I've now written a small python script that sorts out the required information from the current log file and prepares a shell script and a plot file for gnuplot. So once you have installed the mark5access package on the mark5 recorder, there is not much needed than adding a few lines to the checkmk5 procedure in your stations.prc to get it running.
define checkmk5 00000000000x
mk5=rtime?
scan_check
data_check
disk_stats
mk5=dir_info?
mk5=vsn?
mk5=disk_serial?
mk5=bank_set?
" query needed for checkdata.py
mk5b_mode
form
" write out some bytes from beginning of the last scan
!+1s
mk5=scan_set=::+20000000
!+1s
mk5=disk2file=systest.m5b:::w
!+3s
" run checkdata
sy=exec /home/oper/bin/checkdata.py `lognm` &
"
enddef
