ASCII Data Element Configuration File

An ASCII Data Element Configuration file enables you to define the number of elements and their placement through an external file.

Keyword Description
AsciiDataElementPattern v1 Indicates the data format and version of the data format. This is a required keyword and must be the first line in the file.
Element Positions Provide one element position per line, specified as a space-separated pair of numbers: x y, where x and y are in number of wavelengths (lambdas). For elements specified in the file, assign an ID starting with 0 for the first x,y pair read in and ending with an ID of N-1, with N-1 for the Nth x,y pair. Element positions are expected to be on a rectangular grid or a triangular grid.

Lines in the file starting with a hash symbol (#) are treated as a comment line. The uncommented lines represent the following:

The first uncommented line is a tag indicating the type of file followed by the file format version.

The remaining uncommented lines are positions of the elements with following format:

(x0) (y0)

(x1) (y1)

... ...

(xi) (yi)

where (xi) (yi) represent the position of ith element in wavelenghts (lambdas) and 0,0 is at the mechanical boresight.

The following is an example file for a seven-element linear array:

#This is a sample of a seven-element ULA with 0.5 spacing.
AsciiDataElementPattern v1
-1.5 0.0
-1.0 0.0
-0.5 0.0
0.0 0.0
0.5 0.0
1.0 0.0
1.5 0.0