scale Change the scale factor that mutiplies the raw visibility weights. EXAMPLE ------- 0>wtscale Current weight scale factor is: 1 0> 0>wtscale 15 Changed weight scale factor to: 15 0> 0>wtscale wtscale()*2.3 Current weight scale factor is: 15 Changed weight scale factor to: 34.5 0> PARAMETERS ---------- scale - The new scale factor to mulitply the raw visibility weights by. Note that increasing the weights corresponds to decreasing the apparent visibility amplitude uncertainties, and vice versa. In particular, to scale the error bars by a factor C, the argument of the wtscale command would have to be 1/C^2. CONTEXT ------- In UV FITS files each visibility is given a weight that is proportional to the reciprocal of the associated visibility amplitude variance. Unfortunately the constant of proportionality that is optionally given in the same files, is rarely anywhere near the right magnitude, let alone correct. The two adverse results are that 'vplot' displays amplitude uncertainty error bars that are totally non-sensical, and that the self-calibration commands report scaled Chi-squared values that make it difficult to judge the significance of the fit. The 'wtscale' command has been provided to enable one to change the scale factor. In some cases it is possible to deduce the appropriate weight scale factor by knowing where the data originated from, but in other cases getting the "right" factor is unfortunately a matter of guess work. Trial and error based on inspection of the error bars in 'vplot' is the only way to make this guess at the moment. Note that scaling the weights by X scales the error bars by 1/sqrt(X). If the data-set is written back to a UV FITS file the weights will be left un-scaled, but the accumulated scale factor will be recorded via the AIPS mechanism of writing a HISTORY line of the form: HISTORY AIPS WTSCAL=.... Both AIPS and Difmap recognise such lines, so if the file is later read back into difmap or AIPS the weight scale factor will be corrctly recovered. Note that since history lines are written incrementally, there may be many history lines of the above form. The last such line is the one actually used. VLA DATA -------- The VLA writes weights equal to the number of 10s intervals in an integration. The correct weight scale factor can be determined from the equation for the expected noise variance: 1/variance = (1e-26)^2 * Bw.t.(A.na.nc)^2 ---------------- 2.0 * (k.Tsys)^2 Boltzmann's contant : k = 1.38066e-23 J/K System temperature : Tsys = 40K (typical for the VLA). Observing bandwidth : Bw Integration time : t = const * 10s Antenna area : A = 490.8739 m^2 Antenna efficiency : na = 0.63 Correlator efficiency: nc The correlator efficiency depends on the VLA observing mode, but is documented in the synthesis imaging workshop book. Thus given that the raw data weights equal the number of 10 second intervals in an integration, the correct value of wtscale is: wtscale = Bw * nc^2 * 1.5678e-4 Note that when used to combine two stokes parameters into a derived polarization (eg. RR+LL->I), AIPS SPLIT doesn't combine the weights correctly. If you are using data that have been processed in this fashion, the above wtscale factor should be scaled by a factor of 2. If you combine RR+LL->I with 'select' in difmap there is no need for this.