paz / pam

What paz does

paz is primarily about excision and zapping.

In PSRUI's current workflow, it maps most directly to channel-level RFI handling.

Illustrative commands:

paz -z 120 observation.ar
paz -z 120,121,122 observation.ar

What pam does

pam is primarily about archive transforms.

In the current GUI, the most common operations correspond to:

pam -D observation.ar
pam -t 4 -f 2 observation.ar
pam -r 0.125 observation.ar

Those roughly map to:

• dedisperse
• tscrunch / fscrunch
• phase rotate

Typical workflow inside PSRUI

open archive -> waterfall zapping -> pam preview -> export new archive

PSRUI today: the GUI exposes channel zapping and the common pam transforms, but not heuristic interfaces for automatic paz -r, paz -L, or similar helpers.

Common pitfalls

• -m mutates files; PSRUI avoids this by operating on temporary preview copies
• over-scrunching can hide useful diagnostic information
• whether to enable dedispersion early depends on whether you are still diagnosing the observation or preparing output/TOA workflows

Further reading

• PSRCHIVE Manuals
• Pulsar Data Analysis with PSRCHIVE
• Processing Inspector