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Description:

pycrafgui 2.0.1

Version: 2.0.1
Authors: Benjamin Winkel, Marta Bautista, Federico Di Vruno,
Gyula I. G. Józsa
User manual: stable |
developer

The pycraf Python package provides functions and procedures for
various tasks in spectrum-management compatibility studies. A typical example
would be to calculate the interference levels at a radio telescope produced
from a radio broadcasting tower. This package, pycraf-gui contains a
simple graphical user interface, which can be used to do path attenuation
calculations.
Releases are registered on PyPI,
and development is occurring at the
project’s github page.

Project Status

Usage
Starting pycraf-gui
After installation, you can run:
pycraf-gui

License
Several licenses apply; see the license directory in the pycraf repository. The pycraf and pycraf-gui Python packages
itself are published under GPL v3, an open-source license.
For some of the functionality provided in pycraf, data files provided by the
ITU are necessary. For example, the atmospheric model in the pycraf.atm
subpackage implements the algorithm described in ITU-R Recommendation P.676.
Annex 1 of this Recommendation makes use of spectroscopic information of the
oxygen and water vapour lines given in Tables 1 and 2 of P.676. Another
example are the radiometeorological data files that are distributed alongside
ITU-R Rec. P.452-16
ITU kindly gave us permission to include data files into pycraf that are
distributed with the Recommendations on the ITU servers. This makes it possible
to just use pycraf without the need to manually download necessary data files.
However, these data files are not free for commercial use. For details, please
see the LICENSE.ITU file.
Some of the examples/images in the pycraf documentation and tutorial notebooks
make use of Copernicus data. For these, the
conditions in COPERNICUS.EU apply.
Since pycraf uses the Astropy Package Template for packaging, we also refer to the associated license.

Installation
We strongly recommend to use the Anaconda Python distribution, as it allows to download pycraf
binaries for all major platforms (Linux, OSX, Windows). After installing
Anaconda/Miniconda, one can use the conda package manager to install it:
conda install pycraf pycraf-gui -c conda-forge
Of course, it is always a good idea to do this in its own environment, such
that you don’t mess up with your standard environment, e.g.:
conda create -n pycraf-env python=3.9 pycraf pycraf-gui
If you don’t like Anaconda, the easiest way to install pycraf is via pip:
pip install pycraf pycraf-gui
The installation is also possible from source. Download the tar.gz-file,
extract (or clone from GitHub) and simply execute:
python -m pip install .
For further details, we refer to the online documention installation
instructions. It also
includes some hints for running pycraf on Windows or MacOS. Older versions
of the packages may work, but no support will be provided.

SRTM data
To make full use of the path attenuation calculations provided by pycraf
(implements ITU-R Rec. P.452), we recommend to use NASA’s
Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)
data for height-profile generation. pycraf can work with so-called .hgt
files, a very simple binary format. Each .hgt file, a so-called tile, just
contains 1201x1201 16-bit integers. From the file naming scheme, one can infer
the associated coordinates. Most tiles contain one square-degree.
Unfortunately, we cannot provide SRTM data as part of the package, due to the
large file sizes and legal reasons. But once you downloaded the necessary
tiles (all or only a subset appropriate for your region), simply define the
environment variable SRTMDATA, let it point to the folder containing the
tiles, and pycraf will find the files when it is imported from Python.
On windows:
set SRTMDATA=C:\[path-to-srtm]\
On Linux/MacOS (sh-like):
export SRTMDATA=[path-to-srtm]/
There is also the possibility to change the path to the SRTM directory during
run-time (see documentation).

Acknowledgments
We are very grateful for the kind support from ITU study groups and ITU’s
legal department.
This code is makes use of the excellent work provided by the
Astropy community. pycraf uses the Astropy package and also the
Astropy Package Template
for the packaging.

Who do I talk to?
If you encounter any problems or have questions, do not hesitate to raise an
issue or make a pull request. Moreover, you can contact the devs directly:

bwinkel@mpifr.de