Jan. 5, 2015

EPIC recently received reports of RT130’s failing when using two RefTek 4G CF cards at moderately low temperatures during an Antarctic experiment. We have duplicated the failure in our lab and in our testing the failure was associated with a specific version of RefTek well board (RT526D). Although we have not had failures in our testing with earlier or later versions of the board, our sample set is small and we cannot rule out problems with these boards when using two 4G CF cards. We have communicated with RefTek about the issue and at this time they are in agreement with these findings.

ref2sac incorrectly converts Ref Tek RT 130 data files to SAC. I found and fixed a number of bugs in the Mac OS X PASSOFT release of ref2sac. I added LAT, LON, and ELEV to the SAC files. I set the dependent variable type in the SAC file to UNKNOWN, since the data are in counts, not engineering units. I added an option to create the SAC output files in a single, flat directory structure, with unique file names. Those names include an .R. to identify that they contain raw counts.

Attached are my patched files and a README of the changes, plus several sample data files. (The sample data files should not be redistributed without permission.) The sample data files were converted to SAC using the following commands: