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  • Manolis Surligas's avatar
    Support timestamping in the waterfall intermediate file · 8072219a
    Manolis Surligas authored
    The waterfall file has now a constant sized header of 52 bytes,
    so that plotting tools can reconstruct properly the spectrum.
    
    The structure of the header is the following:
      - A 32 byte string containing the timestamp in
        ISO-8601 format. This timer has microsecond accuracy.
      - A 4 byte integer containing the sampling rate
      - A 4 byte integer with the FFT size
      - A 4 byte integer containing the number of FFT snapshots for one row
        at the waterfall
      - A 4 byte float with the center frequency of the observation.
      - A 4 byte integer indicating the endianness of the rest of the file. If
        set to 0 the file continues in Big endian. Otherwise, in little endian.
        The change of the endianness is performed to reduce the overhead at the
        station.
    
     Note that all contents of the header are in Network Byte order! The rest
     of the file is in native byte order, mainly for performance reasons.
     Users can use data of the header to determine if their architecture match
     the architecture of the host generated the waterfall file and act
     accordingly.
    
     The file continues with information regarding the spectral content of the
     observation.
     Each waterfall line is prepended with a int64_t field indicating the
     absolute time in microseconds with respect to the start of the waterfall
     data (stored in the corresponding header field).
     The spectral content is stored in $FFT$ float values already converted in
     dB scale.
    8072219a