Preparing the data

LINC requires LOFAR LBA or HBA raw or pre-processed data. These data are typically obtained from the LOFAR Long-Term Archive.

• The calibrator and target data have to match, i.e., be observed close enough in time that calibration values can be transferred.

• For each observation you should process all the calibrator data at once together. Clock/TEC separation and flagging of bad amplitudes work better with the full bandwidth.

• For the target pipeline you will need to have internet access from the machine you are running LINC. It is required in order to retrieve RM values from GSSC and a global sky model (TGSS or GSM). Both are hosted as online services. It is also possible to provide an own target skymodel to LINC (using the parameters target_skymodel, and use_target, see the target pipeline parameter information).

Note

Processing of interleaved datasets is not currently supported.

LINC can not handle multi-epoch observations at once.

Older versions of LINC: All input measurement-sets for one pipeline run need to be in the same directory.