#429 Cannot update ephemeris

[Scott Ransom]

Hi All,

So something changed recently so that when I try to update a PSRFITS archive with a new ephemeris (stored in TEMPO1) format, I get the following:

pam -E 1748-2446N.par -m GUPPITer5Nzaprm
Error while installing new ephemeris: empty name

I did a bit of poking around and cannot easily see what might be calling this, or even what "name" might be missing. psredit on the input archive looks great (and I can view it just fine) and the input parfile came from TEMPO, so it is in a good state.

Am happy to do other tests if that would help.

Scott

[Paul Demorest]

Scott and I looked at this a bit. The problem comes from code added in commit c9ff72324ca2 (2019/05/14) in T2Generator.C, in the set_parameters() function. It looks like this is trying to look up settings for T2 predictor generation using psrcat. But it's not properly checking whether psrcat is actually available, this leads to the error Scott mentioned.

[Andrew Jameson]

Hi Paul, Scott

I can see where this error has been introduced for psrchive installations which do not have PSRCAT available at configure time. I would have expected to see the error "not implemented for PSRINFO" instead of "empty name" from pam, so I'm a little confused there...

Regardless, I've checked the correction to prevent throwing an error if PSRCAT is not available, (c70fcd, but I would appreciate it if you would be able to confirm this resolves the issue in your environment?

[Paul Demorest]

Thanks for working on this!

The "empty name" message came because Scott's par file originally used "PSR" rather than "PSRJ" for the pulsar name parameter. Changing it to PSRJ resulted in the "not implemeted for PSRINFO" error message as you expect.

[Willem van Straten]

Hi guys,

I just checked in a fix for the PSR / PSRJ / PSRB bug, which as Paul noted is related to https://sourceforge.net/p/dspsr/bugs/92/

Cheers,
Willem