LOFAR beam library

Stand alone version of the LOFAR station response library.

This package provides an abstract interface to a selection of beam responses, and beamformed versions thereof. Currently implemented are:

• Hamaker
• OSKAR-dipole
• LOBES (work in progress)
• OSKAR spherical wave model

Installation

On a clean ubuntu 18.04 computer, the following packages are required:

apt install build-essential casacore-dev cmake python3-distutils libblas-dev liblapack-dev libhdf5-dev

Installation is then typically done as:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
make install

A Dockerfile to compile a working version of DPPP and LOFARBeam is included in the test directory.

Use with DPPP

To use with DPPP, the streaming visibility framework used for LOFAR, currently the branch oskar from that repository is required.

A test measurementset is included in DPPP (tNDPPP-generic.in_MS.tgz).

To simulate visibilities with a certain element model, use DPPP DPPP.parset where DPPP.parset contains:

msin=tNDPPP-generic.MS
msout=.
steps=[predict]
predict.usebeammodel=True
predict.elementmodel=oskardipole
predict.sourcedb=tNDPPP-generic.MS/sky  # sourcedb file

Compatibility note

This package has undergone the same branching process as the DP3 package: it is a continuation of the LOFAR beam library at svn.astron.nl/LOFAR, and was extracted from and branched off LOFAR Release 3.2. The LOFAR beam package will likely not be maintained in the ASTRON repository.