Further LOFAR development

[MijnheerD]

This is a draft PR to follow up on the newest additions from the LOFAR side. These should mainly concern LOFAR specific modules, except for some framework changes that might happen do accommodate LOFAR specific requirements.

[anelles]

It looks like this has gotten out of sync with the general branch. I suggest to really not keep PRs open for so long -- the further it gets the more annoying it is to merge later.
@MijnheerD @karenterveer @PhilippLaub can you resolve the merge conflicts and merge and then continue with smaller changes?

[MijnheerD]

It looks like this has gotten out of sync with the general branch. I suggest to really not keep PRs open for so long -- the further it gets the more annoying it is to merge later. @MijnheerD @karenterveer @PhilippLaub can you resolve the merge conflicts and merge and then continue with smaller changes?

All of the conflicts should be artificial, in the sense that it probably results from this branch behind on develop. Github has some issues with tracking updates in PRs when both the origin and target branches change, so this might not show up correctly. Any changes that come from this branch should only touch LOFAR specific files.

The idea was to have this PR be a draft until we had a pipeline. Seeing we recently got to a state where we can run our pipeline, I guess we can convert it to a real PR and merge :)

[MijnheerD]

@cg-laser @anelles @sjoerd-bouma To help you with the review process, the only non-LOFAR files that were touched are:

• detector_base.py : added the get_antenna_mode() function which retrieves the "antenna_mode" keyword from the detector description. In the context of LOFAR we use this keyword to distinguish the channels connected to different antenna sets.
• antennapattern.py: the preprocess_LOFAR_txt() function has been changed to allow to specify X/Y dipole when generating the antenna models (this is necessary because somehow the old models were different for the two orientations)
• channelGalacticNoiseAdder.py: these changes are from the feature/galacticNoiseAdderUpgrade branch, which I think are being included in galactic noise adder upgrades #740 (?)

[MijnheerD]

I decided to make a new section called version 3.1.0-dev in the changelog.txt 😇 If you agree with this naming scheme, then everything should be ready for review now!

[anelles]

It is not super trivial to review such a huge PR. A couple of (I hope) smaller points to be fixed.

[anelles]

I am not sure, I like variables with my_ ... this sounds like a hack (without having tested this).

[MijnheerD]

I am not sure what you mean? This variable should be local to the negative_beamed_signal() function, and my standard way of not interfering with variables from the outer scope is to append "my_" in front.

[MijnheerD]

Thanks for all the comments Anna! The intent was indeed not for you to go over all the individual LOFAR modules, as these should have been reviewed internally already. The most important thing is that we don't break existing NRR functionality. But I very much appreciate the comments you left :)

[MijnheerD]

As an aside, my goal was to also document the LOFAR modules and files more clearly in the LOFAR documentation, that @sjoerd-bouma started in #767