SDI Operator's Manual
Revised July 2000

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Interpreting Console Messages

All console messages start with a time stamp. This is the date and time of the message. The possible messages are:

Image Start

An image start message looks like this:

         1998.023.143231 Image start 1998.023.143150

The first date and time is the time the ingestor saw the data while the second is the (slightly earlier) time contained in the data stream itself.

Data Loss

Data loss means that one or more scans of data have been missed. This can be because of a problem anywhere in the data transmission chain. Not necessarily in equipment under your control.

CRC Error

CRC error messages occur when the signal is getting noisy. The messages begin to happen before there is a noticeable degradation in image quality, but they are a warning that something is not working up to expectations and should be looked into. If CRC errors become too numerous, ingestion will stop because it is no longer possible to trust the accuracy of the data documentation blocks.

Image Complete

An image complete message looks like this:

  1998.023.145505 GMS 1998.023.143150 scans=231 2130 areas=2 42

This means that the image data is finished. However, the image is not visible to McIDAS yet. See the Signal Off message description below for more information.

The two numbers that follow areas= designate the VIS image AREA number and the IR image AREA number, respectively. In the image complete message above, the VIS image is written to AREA 2 and the IR image is written to AREA 42.

Signal Off

The signal off message comes later than the Image Complete message because data is still transmitted after the valid video. The image is not visible to McIDAS until the Signal Off message occurs. Therefore, this message means the image is now available for serving.


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