SOFTC: A Software Correlator for VLBI

Abstract

SOFTC is an advanced software implementation of a signal correlator for very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) for measuring positions of natural celestial objects and distant spacecraft. Because of increases in processing speeds of general-purpose computers, software VLBI correlators have become viable alternatives to hardware ones. The input to SOFTC consists of digitized samples of raw VLBI-antenna received- signal voltages. Optionally, SOFTC also tracks calibration tones superimposed on the received signals. The outputs of SOFTC are (1) phases and amplitudes as functions of time and frequency for cross-correlated received signals and (2) phases and amplitudes as functions of time, station, and tone number for the calibration tones. SOFTC was created to be as accurate as possible, capable of processing essentially any VLBI data, pass strong debugging tests, have a simple user interface, and have no platform dependencies. SOFTC is written modularly in the C programming language. The great advantage of implementing a correlator in software, in contradistinction to hardware, is that it becomes relatively easy and much less expensive and time-consuming to adapt, modify, improve, and update the correlator.