RST5.1 released

May 1, 2025

We are pleased to announce that a new minor release of the SuperDARN Radar Software Toolkit is now available!

Download RST5.1

Key updates in version 5.1 of the Radar Software Toolkit (RST) include:

  • New additions
    • Addition of AACGM_v2 and IGRF coefficients to support mapping until the beginning of 2030
    • New tool (find_elvstat) for info on realistic number of elevation angle measurements in a fit-level file
    • New conversion tool (oldsndtosnd) to convert old sounding data (snd) written in binary format to the more modern dmap format
    • New derivation of eccentric dipole coordinates for the TS18 and TS18-Kp convection models
    • Addition of slant range parameter (srng) to grid and map files
  • New/Updated Radar Information
    • Addition of Iceland East (ice), West (icw); Longjing East (lje), West (ljw); Siziwanqi East (sze), West (szw); Hejing East (hje), West (hjw) radar information
    • Updated hdw.dat files for Blackstone (bks), Kodiak (kod)
    • Updated radar location information based on satellite imagery
    • Addition of tdiff.dat files for several radars
  • Updates to Current Binaries and Libraries
    • Modification to grid_filter binary to allow filtering data based on range as well as control program ID.
    • Updates to fitacfclientgui to allow viewing range gate or slant range, on-screen key menu, selection of groundscatter flag, and color scale control
    • Addition of -xshift and -yshift options to field_plot binary to allow shifts to plotting area; also addition of -databeam option to plot field-of-view edges
    • Addition of -dot option in field_plot to mark radar location
    • Improvements for plotting snd data with time_plot
    • Updates to fit library to check for valid elevation angle information and use the sky noise from fitted data to populate the noise fields in grid and map files
    • Support for beam offset parameter included in rtsnd binary
  • Documentation, Bug fixes and Miscellaneous
    • Improvements to xmldoc and scdoc binaries used for documentation creation
    • Updating version of mpfit from 1.4 to 1.5
    • Various documentation improvements (e.g. updated installation instructions for Mac OS)
    • Various typo errors, bug fixes, and memory leak fixes
    • Updates to compilation checks in github development environment
    • Support for .tcsh profiles has been removed

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the development and testing of this release! As always, we encourage users to contact us if they have questions or find problems with the software. New contributions to the software are also most welcome. You can contact us by opening an “issue” on the github page, or alternatively by email.