The Menu Bar


The meu bar items are separated into functional groups by vertical dividers. The File item is in a group of its own, because almost all tools can only be accessed once a database is opened. Exceptions are Portable Spectrometry processing and calibration, where input and output is via text files, and the Lineament Enhancement tool which operates on gridded data. For processing airborne gamma-ray data, the processing sequence follows a left-to-right traverse of the first two groups of items on the menu bar as follows:

  1. Open a database – File|...
  2. Set the database aliases – Settings|Set Aliases. Aliases are the names that GammaSpec uses to access database fields. 
  3. Set the processing parameters – Settings|Set Parameters. Parameters are the processing and control constants used by GammaSpec tools.
  4. Run NASVD spectral smoothing on the gamma-ray spectra – NASVD|…
  5. Energy-calibrate the gamma-ray spectra – Energy Calibrate|...
  6. Extract livetime-corrected window count rates from the spectra – Window|…
  7. Correct the window data to elemental concentrations – Corrections|…
  8. The final item in this group (Utilities) gives access to tools to calculate database field statistics, create group-by fields, calculate dose rate and radioelement ratios, save NASVD-smoothed spectra, sample custom windows in the spectra, sum spectra to 256 channels, and to remove/insert null values into ancillary fields. 

The settings (aliases and parameters) required to run the tools described in 4-8 above are all set via the Settings menu item. The output from these tools is directed to the Main Window and the User Log File. 

Quick Link: See Technical Note 2: Gamma-Ray Calibration And Data Processing for a description of the data processing steps required for airborne gamma-ray spectrometry.

The next group contains just the View menu item. It gives access to various tools to view the flight path, data fields, spectra and NASVD eigenvectors. 

The next group contains the following menu items:

  1. Calibration:  all the tools required for calibrating airborne spectrometers – pad calibrations, aircraft and cosmic background, calibration range calibrations and calibrating the spectral-ratio and upward-looking detector methods for estimating radon background.
  2. Enhancements:  tools to enhance processed gamma-ray data, including topographic corrections, the inversion of airborne data to elemental ground concentration grids, anomaly detection, and lineament enhancement.
  3. Portable:  tools to process and calibrate portable spectrometers.

The tools in this last group are essentially stand-alone programs. They have their own user interfaces with menu items to set aliases and parameters independent of the Main Window Settings menu item. Their output is also directed to their own user log files.

The final menu (Help) provides access to the GammaSpec User Guide.

Important Note:

GammaSpec makes processing easy by facilitating the setting of most aliases and parameters for processing in one place (the Settings menu). These are stored in memory and shared between processes (tools). They remain available until a new database is opened. To maintain the integrity of the database, and the stored parameters, only one tool may be executed at a time. There are a few exceptions – for example, more than one View Flight Path tool can be used at the same time.