Prerequisites

If you've built casacore, pyrap, and Timba, then you already have almost everything installed. The only additional requirement is the Boost.Preprocessor library (http://www.boost.org, Debian/Ubuntu packagage libboost-dev).

Checking out makems

makems resides in a separate directory on our Subversion server. Check out as follows:

$ svn co svn://lofar9.astron.nl/var/svn/repos/trunk/MakeMS

or (if you have a lofar9 account):

$ svn co svn+ssh://lofar9.astron.nl/var/svn/repos/trunk/MakeMS

Building

Building makems is just a standard round of configure/make/make install through several packages. There is a shell script provided that will do this for you:

```
 $ cd MakeMS
 $ ./build.sh
```

Note that this requires casacore and wcslib (which you would already have installed for casacore), by default it will look in /usr/local, but you can always change this by rerunning the build script with different --with-casacore= and --with-wcs= arguments.

The final result is a makems executable installed in /usr/local/bin (or whatever other --prefix you supplied.)

Running makems

You need a file called makems.cfg in the current directory. This describes the various attributes of the MS. A sample file is available in MakeMS/MS-0.1/test/makems.cfg, it is pretty much self-documenting.

You also need an ANTENNA table giving antenna positions (makems.cfg tells the tool which table to use). You can copy an ANTENNA table from any existing MS. Alternatively, you can create this table from scratch using the pyrap_tables interface -- I'm hoping someone will make a script for this and place it into the waterhole soon...

Note that makems can split MSs into chunks of time (see the NParts parameter in makems.cfg.) Even if you don't use this feature (NParts=1) and make only one MS, it is still going to be called *.MS_p1 ('p1' stands for part 1), so you might want to rename it to *.MS.