DSPSR user documentation: dspsr

1.0 Purpose

The Digital Signal Processing for Pulsars (dspsr) program reduces radio pulsar astronomical time series, producing one or more folded pulse profiles. The main features of this program are as follows:
  • makes optimal use of multiple core architectures using POSIX threads;
  • can attach to the PSRDADA shared memory ring buffer to process data directly from RAM;
  • processes both phase-coherent and detected data;
  • Jenet & Anderson (1998) dynamic output level setting;
  • phase-coherent dispersion removal;
  • filterbank generation (with simultaneous dispersion removal);
  • full-polarimetric detection;
  • profile folding using a constant period, tempo polyco, tempo2 predictor, or acceleration search parameters;
  • data may be divided into sub-integrations of arbitrary length, including single pulses;
  • multiple pulsars (e.g. globular cluster) may be folded simultaneously;
  • folded profiles can be output in PSRFITS format.

2.0 Usage

The default behaviour of dspsr depends upon the state of the input data. If the input data
  • have already been detected, then dspsr will simply fold the data into the given number of polarization and frequency channels.
  • are undetected voltages, then dspsr will perform phase-coherent dispersion removal before detecting (full-polarization, if possible) and folding.
There are a number of different options and uses for dspsr. The following pages describe how to

3.0 Algorithms

4.0 Testing and examples

5.0 Known bugs and features that require implementation

  • It would be great if dspsr could compute the cyclostationary statistics of the electric field