Using NDPPP

The LOFAR NDPPP tool can be used to bin together timeslots and channels of an MS.

Prerequisites

* cmake 2.6.2 or higher. 2.6-patch0 does NOT work! 2.8 should be OK too.

* flex, bison, gfortran and all sorts of other stuff -- cmake will tell you (see below.)

* only one spectral window is processed (I think...), so split your MSs by spectral window.

Checking out NDPPP

Building NDPPP

First, you must check out the LOFAR CMake environment.

$ mkdir DP3   # call it whatever you want 
$ cd DP3
$ svn checkout -N https://svn.astron.nl/LOFAR/trunk LOFAR 
###
### (must have a username/password on svn.astron.nl!)
###
$ cd LOFAR 
$ svn up CMake 
$ cd ..

Now make your self a build directory, and run cmake in it:

$ mkdir -p build/gnu_opt   # next to LOFAR directory
$ cd build/gnu_opt
$ cmake ../../LOFAR  -DBUILD_PACKAGES=DPPP -DLOFAR_SVN_UPDATE=ON -DUSE_LOG4CPLUS=OFF -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF
### -DLOFAR_SVN_UPDATE=ON is optional, only use it 
### if you want it to go and update the code from svn.

This will most likely give you errors because of missing packages, so install what it asks for (everything should be available in e.g. the Ubuntu distro) and rerun cmake.

NB: if things get really confused, rm -fr * in the build directory to clear out all caches.

Now make the beast:

$ make -j4    ## where 4 = number of cores roughly
$ make install

The binary you now need is now under:

```
LOFAR/installed/gnu_opt/bin/NDPPP
```

You may link or copy it to a more convenient location.

Running NDPPP

You need a .parset file, here's an example: ndppp-timebin.parset.

msin = in.MS
msout = out.MS
msout.writefullresflag = False
msout.tilesize = 128

steps = [avg]

avg.type = average
avg.timestep = 3
avg.freqstep = 1

Tile size is the storage manager tile size, 128 is a reasonable number (ask Ger van Diepen for details). Timestepm and freqstep tells it how many timeslots/channels to bin together.

Now just run

$ NDPPP ndppp-timebin.parset