[Everyone] PSRCHIVE bug: PSRFITS data systematically attenuated

[Willem van Straten]

Hi everyone,

Today, I checked in a couple of PSRCHIVE bug fixes that may have a small
impact on your data.  These bugs are relevant only to PSRFITS file I/O.

1. To date, when writing data to a PSRFITS file, PSRCHIVE has been
converting floating point values to signed 16-bit integers by truncation
(casting as opposed to rounding).  This has the effect of systematically
decreasing the range of values in the data (e.g. -1.999 is truncated to -1
and +1.999 is truncated to +1).

2. Since April 2016, when writing data to a PSRFITS file, PSRCHIVE has
effectively been using only 15 of the 16 bits, which effectively doubles
the rounding error.

You can read more about these errors and the bug fixes at

https://sourceforge.net/p/psrchive/bugs/440/

Please update your PSRCHIVE installation and let everyone know if you
discover any issues that are greater than those encountered so far
(described at the above link).

Cheers,
Willem
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