Home

Welcome to the voacapl wiki!

VOACAPl User's Guide

As voacapl is port of VOACAP, much of the information here is applicable to VOACAP as well.

Setting Up voacapl

VOACAP requires access to a number of data files containing input parameters, ionospheric coefficient, antenna characteristics etc. These are stored in a defined hiearchy under a nominated direcory name, usually itshfbc. This may be created in your home directory by running the command makeitshfbc.

When running voacapl, the location of the itshfbc directory must be specified, i.e.;

voacapl ~/itshfbc

The above command will run voacapl, reading input parameters from the default location (itshfbc/run/voacapx.dat) and writing results to the defualt output file location (itshfbc/run/voacapx.dat)

##Absorption Model Most users will be happy with the dafault absorption model. Some users may however wish to experiment with alternative models. These may be selected by modifying the contents of the file itshfbc/database/version.w32;

• Version 16.1207W = normal code
• Version 16.1207I = use old IONCAP absorption model
• Version 16.1207A = use Alex's changes with normal absorption
• Version 16.1207a = use Alex's changes with IONCAP absorption

Input Files

Input files are r

Input Cards

The formatting of the input deck is critical to the operation of voacap and many 'bugs' can be traced to a malformed deck. This section defines the formatting of the input deck.

ANTENNA

This card is used to define the characteristics of the transmit and receive antennas and is formatted as follows;

ANTENNA       1    1    2   30     0.000[harris/[email protected]   ]  0.0    0.4000
ANTENNA       2    2    2   30     0.000[harris/1950BD10.anw  ] 23.2    0.0000

This is read by voacapl with the following;

1510 FORMAT(10X,4I5,f10.3,1x,a21,1x,f5.1,f10.4)
READ(INPUT,1510) IAT,iantr,minfreq,maxfreq,designfreq(iantr),antfile(iantr),beammain(iantr),pwrkw(iantr)

Columns	Name	Format	Description
1-10	Label	10X	ANTENNA Label
11-15	IAT	I5	Antenna Type (1 = Transmit, 2 = Receive)
16-20	iantr	I5	integer value to identify antenna
21-25	minfreq	I5	Minimum frequency of operation
26-30	maxfreq	I5	maximum frequency of operation
31-40	designfreq	F10.3	Antenna design frequency
41-61	antfile	A21	Filepath to the relevant antenna file (relative to the itshfbc directory)
62-66	beammain	f5.1	Antenna bearing (degrees)
67-76	pwerkw	f10.4	Power (kW)