[AWIPS #NXH-679946]: LDM vs pqact question

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your detailed email. It's really appreciated so that we can 
understand what 
you're trying to do and be able to provide you with the most useful information.

I think you're definitely on the right track here: 
"..is there a way to present it to the LDM for processing or do we
skip the LDM...?"

The answer to this question is yes, and yes.  You can feed this data into your 
own LDM,
and you can actually skip the LDM altogether and feed it straight to AWIPS.
What I suggest you do is the former.  The latter was designed as a pathway for 
testing things
and I believe it will fail eventually with high volumes of data.

So, in order to do the first option, you have to have an LDM set up on your own 
system.
You can either do this from our website:
https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/ldm/
Or, I believe the EDEX install you used actually comes with an ldm installed 
under /awips2/ldm/.

Once you have an ldm installed and running, you're going to need to "feed" your 
radar files
into it.
This can be done with the program: pqinsert
You should define the following on insert: logfile, ldm queue, feedtype and 
product id
You'll want to specify a logfile where this will write to.  It should be 
somewhere you'll 
remember in case things stop working, as you might want to read the contents.
You can get the location of your ldm queue by running another program: regutil
The following command will return the ldm queue:
regutil /queue/path

The important thing to note is that if you set up this feed in a "clever" way, 
then you shouldn't
need to modify any of the AWIPS code (including the pqact.conf file).
What I mean by that is, if you name your feed and product id in the same way 
that it expects it
to come in, then it will treat it as that feed (NEXRAD3).
So, if you call your feedtype NEXRAD3 on your pqinsert command, then it will 
look in the current
pqact.conf file for actions responding to the NEXRAD3 feed.  Next, you should 
look at pqact.conf
to see what type of product id it expects, and what it does with it:

NEXRAD3 ^SDUS[23578]. .... (..)(..)(..).*/p(...)(...)
        FILE    -overwrite -close -edex
        /awips2/data_store/radar/\5_\4_(\1:yyyy)(\1:mm)\1_\2\3

It's expecting an id that matches the regex expression in the first line, and 
then it is going 
to write out a file from parsing that id, which is defined in that last line. 

Then, double check the distribution file for edex: 
/awips2/edex/data/utility/common_static/base/distribution/radar.xml
And you'll see it expects to see a header that matches: "^SDUS[234578]. .*"
I'm not sure what your files look like, but our files have a three line header 
at the top of 
them that looks like this:

621 ^M
SDUS23 KPAH 111828^M
N2SVWX^M

So, as long as your files have a header that contains a line that starts with 
"SDUS[a number] "
then it should match and process the file for AWIPS.

The reason why I'm mentioning this, instead of just suggesting editing the 
pqact.conf file and
radar.xml file, is because if you ever change versions of the edex you'll have 
to do a full
uninstall and full reinstall, and you'll have to remember to replace these 
files afterwards.  By
"fitting in" with what it already expects, you shouldn't have to maintain that 
extra relationship.

If everything goes well, you should see your products show up in the menus at 
the top of AWIPS.  I 
believe you should also be able to find them in the product browser, if you're 
familiar with that.

That should get you started, please let me know if this helps and if you have 
other questions.
Thanks!
--Shay Carter

Software Engineer II
UCAR - Unidata

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: NXH-679946
Department: Support AWIPS
Priority: Normal
Status: Open
===================
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