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Support timestamping in the waterfall intermediate file

Manolis Surligas requested to merge surligas/gr-satnogs:waterfall-3.8 into master

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.

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