dofloat Self calibrate to determine overall telescope amplitude corrections. EXAMPLES ------- 0>gscale Computing UV representation of latest clean model (147 components) The established model now contains 147 components and 7.0511 Jy Performing overall amplitude self-cal Correcting IF 1. Amplitude normalization factor in sub-array 1: 1.01723 Telescope amplitude corrections in sub-array 1: BONN 0.97 WSRT 0.95 JBNK1 0.99 BOLOGNA 1.01 TORUN 1.00* HART 1.01 HSTK 1.01 NRAO 1.02 VLBA_KP 0.96 VLBA_PT 1.00* VLBA_LA 0.96 VLA27 0.98 OVRO 0.96 Fit before self-cal, rms=0.498946Jy sigma=3.396564 Fit after self-cal, rms=0.438911Jy sigma=3.160276 Reinstating the default IF. 0> All but the first line are responses from the 'gscal' command. Some of the reported corrections are post-fixed with a '*' symbol. This means that no solution was possible for that telescope. These corrections are not 1.0, only because of amplitude normalization. Without amplitude normalization (dofloat=true) the same data-set gave: 0>gscale true Performing overall amplitude self-cal Correcting IF 1. Telescope amplitude corrections: BONN 0.97 WSRT 0.95 JBNK1 0.98 BOLOGNA 1.01 TORUN 1.00* HART 1.02 HSTK 1.02 NRAO 1.01 VLBA_KP 0.96 VLBA_PT 1.00* VLBA_LA 0.96 VLA27 0.98 OVRO 0.96 Fit before self-cal, rms=0.500856Jy sigma=3.412605 Fit after self-cal, rms=0.365222Jy sigma=2.861346 Reinstating the default IF. 0> PARAMETER --------- dofloat - If this parameter is omitted or given as false, the telescope corrections are normalized to maintain the current total flux. Alternatively, if dofloat=true then the telescope amplitudes will be allowed to float and the observed flux may be changed if not sufficiently constrained. CONTEXT ------- When one or more telescopes are miscalibrated by a constant factor, this command may be used to solve for the correct telescope amplitudes. In order to do this a reasonable model of the source structure must have been provided. Such a model may be provided using CLEAN or using a model from the VLBI modelfit program read into this program via the 'rmodel' command. This command should be used with caution. For instance, comparison of the current model, in 'vplot', and the observed visibilities may appear to indicate a number of consistently high baselines. This often indicates data that hasn't been cleaned deeply enough. In particular, check to see if just the shortest baselines are too high by examining the plot of visibility amplitude verus UV radius given by the radplot command. Such missing flux implies the existence of un-cleaned low surface brightness extended emission that hasn't been cleaned yet. Try switching to natural weighting (see help uvweight) and/or apply a UV-taper before cleaning (see help uvtaper). This may reveal such emission, which may then be cleaned. If it turns out that artifacts due to poor amplitude calibration, prevent you from cleaning low surface-brightness extended emission then you should use the selftaper command to weight down the significance of the short baseline visibilities before calling gscale (see help selftaper). Failure to do this will make gscale attempt to force the visibility data to fit the incomplete model at short UV radii. Amplitude self-calibration relies implicitly on the existence of closure amplitudes. To form such a closure amplitude requires that there be un-flagged visibilities on that lie baselines in closed arrays of at least 4 telescopes. Gscale attempts to detect visibilities that do not satisfy these conditions and exclude them from the fit. How it does this, and whether these visibilities are then flagged, is controlled by the selfflag command. See help selfflag for more details. NB. Observations that contain multiple sub-arrays and/or multiple IFs will produce nif * nsub lists of telescope corrections, instead of the single list given the examples above. RELATED COMMANDS ---------------- selfflag - Used to control the fate of un-correctable data. selfcal - General self-calibration command. selftaper - Used to down-weight short baselines during selfcal. selflims - Used to set limits to amp and phase corrections in selfcal. startmod - Phase selfcal to a starting model then discard the model.