generate

9. Generating mock data

9.1 Creating a filterbank file

To generate a filterbank file you may use the following example code:

import filterbank.header as header

header = {
    b'source_name': b'P: 80.0000 ms, DM: 200.000',
    b'machine_id': 10,
    b'telescope_id': 4,
    b'data_type': 1,
    b'fch1': 400,
    b'foff': -0.062,
    b'nchans': 128,
    b'tstart': 6000.0,
    b'tsamp': 8e-05,
    b'nifs': 1,
    b'nbits': 8
}

header.generate_file("file_path/file_name", header)

The header data is passed in a header dict. For a more detailed explanation on the file header, please consult chapter 2.2.

9.2 Generate signal

The generate_signal method generates a mock signal based on the following parameters:

Variable	Description
noise_level	the max amplitude of the generated noise
period	period of the signal
t_obs	observation time in s
n_pts	intervals between samples

9.3 Generate header

The generate_header method generates a header string based on the header dict provided in the example in chapter 8.1. The dict provides keys encoded in bytes and the method converts each keyword to a string using the keyword_to_string method (see below).

9.4 Keyword to string

The keyword_to_string method converts a keyword from the header dict to a serialized string.

9.5 Write data

Once all the required data is generated to a filterbank file. The data is written to the file as bytes.

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