Digitizer Suite: The Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory Digitizer Testing Suite

Abstract

Laboratory testing of digitizers and seismometers helps ensure that, before deployment, the instrumentation can produce high-quality data and is operating within specifications. In this work, we detail the software package called the Albuquerque Seismological Laboratory digitizer test suite. This Java software package provides several algorithms to verify various performance parameters of digitizers commonly used for recording analog seismic instruments. The goal of these tests is not to be exhaustive, but to identify common failures that could compromise the integrity of seismic data being recorded on the digitizer. For example, Sandia National Laboratories (e.g., Slad and Merchant, 2018) routinely do comprehensive testing of digitizers for various monitoring missions. Although these test reports are valuable for comprehensively characterizing a recording system, it would be resource-intensive to conduct such tests on every seismic recorder used in a network. We focus on tests that include ways to estimate the sensitivity, timing, self-noise, and clip level of the digitizer, as well as the fidelity of the signal being recorded. The software is publicly available and provides a way for the community to verify the integrity of a digitizer using a minimum amount of outside equipment.