Important Note: PSRCHIVE 7 implements various interface changes required to support TEMPO2. For developers, the main consequences of these changes are that the Archive class interfaces to the telescope code and the polyco and psrephem classes have been modified. Therefore, code that used the previous interfaces will have to be updated in order to compile against version 7 and later.

New Features in PSRCHIVE 7.4

TEMPO2 Support: TEMPO2 parameters are now parsed from PSRFITS files

Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (IPP) Support: The IPP FFT library can now be used on 64-bit architectures

Bugs Fixed:

  • RA_SUB and DEC_SUB are in degrees in new PSRFITS files
  • A memory leak in the Tempo2::Parameters class was fixed

New Features in PSRCHIVE 7.3

Frequency band combination: The psradd program now supports the ability to combine data from different frequency bands, producing a single archive with greater bandwidth and number of frequency channels.

Polarimetric Calibration: The pcm program now verifies that the phase of the input pulsar profiles does not drift over time.

Bugs Fixed: A major bug in vap was fixed.

New Features in PSRCHIVE 7.2

TEMPO2 Support: It is now possible to generate new predictors using the TEMPO2 library (full support is still under development).

Parameter Query: David Smith has ported vap to SourceForge and expanded the program to output a much greater range of parameters.

Plotting: The plotting program, psrplot, can now plot stacked profiles instead of greyscale/colour images.

Various Bug Fixes: In addition to the new features described above, the following issues were resolved:

  • configure did not properly set up FFTW_LIBS when found in $PACKAGES
  • configure did not correctly set the IPP automake conditional
  • pcm had a significant memory leak

New Features in PSRCHIVE 7.1

Version 7.1 is primarily a bug fix distribution; some helpful features were also added to the pazi and psrsh programs, and support of the Intel Math Kernel Library FFT interface has been updated.

Bugs Fixed: The following issues were resolved:

  • invariant interval function set profile weights equal to centre frequency
  • the -g debug flag was not removed from CFLAGS on Mac OS X
  • changing the configure script --prefix argument caused recompilation

RFI Mitigation: The pazi program now supports the ability to disable dedispersion, so that non-dispersed impulsive interfence is more obvious. It is also possible to undelete.

Command Language Interpreter: The psrsh interpreter now supports RFI mitigation commands (zap), polarimetric calibration commands (cal), and conversion to the invariant interval (invint).

New Features in PSRCHIVE 7.0

Version 7.0 includes a number of new developments:

TEMPO2 Support: It is now possible to use the TEMPO2 Predictor (like the TEMPO polyco) to model the phase of the pulsar. This functionality is still under development and testing.

Flexible Configuration: Using the PACKAGES environment variable, it is possible to specify the root directory in which to find the appropriate FFTW and CFITSIO libraries.

Administrative Support: System installation adminsistration scripts have been added to assist in managing software versions at sites where stability is important.

64-bit Architecture Support: The software has been compiled and tested on 64-bit machines with dual Intel Xeon quad-core chips.

Updated OS X and GCC Support: The instructions for OS X and GCC users have been updated, and more configuration error traps have been put into place.

More Efficient use of Predictors: The psradd program now uses the phase predictor model information stored in an archive more efficiently (does not regenerate the polyco/predictor as frequently as before).

Polarimetric Error Propagation: The pcm program now outputs the covariances of the calibration model parameters. These may be used to estimate the covariances between the calibrated Stokes parameters.

Various Bug Fixes: In addition to the new features described above, the following issues were resolved:

  • psrplot cannot integrate in more than one dimension
  • Archive::total returns with state=Coherency
  • psrplot not working with -Y option
  • pcm producing NaN in output
  • psrconv does not produce valid FITS file