The FITS Interferometry Data Interchange Convention (“FITS-IDI”) is a set of conventions layered upon the standard FITS format to assist in the interchange of data recorded by interferometric telescopes, particularly at radio frequencies and very long baselines.

pyFitsidi is a collection of functions that create headers and data units that conform to the FITS-IDI convention. It was written primarily to convert data from a CASPER correlator into a format that can be imported into data reduction packages such as AIPS++ and CASA.

pyFitsidi is built upon pyFITS and numpy. Astronomical coordinate calculations are done with pyEphem, and the HDF file reading is done with pyTables (although you could use h5py also). HTML documentation (generated with sphinx), can be found in docs/_build/html, and there is also a PDF file.

Links

pyFitsidi @ Github
https://github.com/telegraphic/pyfitsidi

Much more info on the FITS IDI convention can be found on its official page
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/registry/fitsidi.html

pyFitsidi uses pyFITS for file I/O, so its worth getting familiar with pyfits
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits

Finally, there are useful FITS resources at the NASA FITS website
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_home.html

To get it working, you’ll  have to copy the ociamthesis-lyx.cls into your TeX installation, and copy the ociamthesis-lyx.layout to your LyX layout directory. Have a read of the readme.txt for further instructions. Finally, here’s an example PDF.

Update (May 2011): I have moved the files over to Github, to open it up to the world a little!

Note: Some people have had issues with the \maketitle, which comes about due to something to do with graphics in child documents. It can be fixed by adding the line

\usepackage{graphicx}

to the preamble (go to the menu document > settings > LaTeX preamble).

Download LyX template »

• LyX: A frontend for LaTeX,  specially designed for people who don’t like LaTeX. You could consider it “training wheels for LaTeX”, but if you learn it well you’ll probably never need to learn full-on LaTeX.
• JabREF: A reference manager for making Bibtex bibliographies. It plays nice with LyX, and you can use it to organise all those papers you read just for fun.
• Inkscape: A vector graphics program (SVG). Super useful for making diagrams to put into LaTeX. If you’re using LyX, the best option is to save your files as PDF when you want to insert them into LyX.

These are all free, and cross-platform. Note that for LyX, you’ll need to download TeX as well. Just follow the instructions on the lyx download page and you should be fine. The only other thing you’ll need is a graphing program: I’d recommend Mathematica, MATLAB and OriginPro (note: not free).

A few hot tips:

• Press Ctrl + L to manually enter LaTeX, whenever you can’t do it out-of-the-box
• Press Ctrl + M to enter maths mode
• Learn all the maths shortcut key combinations (e.g. press Alt + M, then F to input a fraction)
• Watch some youtube videos, like this one, to help you get up to speed

Good luck…

Download LyX template »

## Open a connection to the VNA
VNA = visa.instrument("GPIB::06")

## Select a channel
VNA.write("CH1")

## Get frequency data
freq = VNA.ask_for_values("OFV")

## Get channel data
S11 = VNA.ask_for_values("OFD")

If you’re lazy just run the grabData script and voila. If you’re not, try editing the grabData() function to your needs and script away.

To get this to work, you’ll need Python 2.5, pyVisa and the relevant NI drivers (488.2 and for me the ones for the UBS-GPIB thing). There’s some useful documentation on the Anritsu site here. Kudos to Oliver King for his help .