TO:  All GCN Notice recipients
RE:  Separation of the TOO-initiated Notices
DT:  10 Nov 08

INTRO:
There is now filtering which differentiates between
Regular burst-related SWIFT_FOM & SWIFT_SC_SLEW Notices versus
TOO-initiated SWIFT_FOM & SWIFT_SC_SLEW Notices.  Prior to this,
there was no way for a site to block out the TOO-initiated forms
of these two Notice types (without giving up the burst-initiated forms).

MOTIVATION FOR THIS FILTERING CAPABILITY:
In the early years of Swift, this may not have been much of a problem
for a site, because the occurance rate of these TOO-initiated variants
was small compared to the burst-related variants.  But over the years,
Swift has increasingly been doing more and more TOOs.  Currently,
the ratio of TOO-related to burst-related is 5 to 1.
Some sites have expressed a desire to not receive the TOO-initiated
FOM and/or SC_SLEW notices (because there are too many of them
and they seldom are about "timely" targets, but they still want
to be notified when Swift slews to a new burst).

SOLUTION:
GCN now has new enable/disable filtering flags for these two variations
on these two types.  If enabled, you will get the TOO-initiated variants
of the SWIFT_FOM and SWIFT_SC_SLEW Notices.

CHANGES:
A) For e-mail-based sites (full-format, cell, pager), there is NO change.
All the contents, formats, and Subject-lines are the same.
B) For the socket-based sites, there is a small change.  The type numbers
of the TOO-initiated forms are 46 and 47 instead of the original 65 and 66
for the SWIFT_FOM and SWIFT_SC_SLEW packets, respectively.  All the other 
bytes in the packets stay exactly the same.
I apologize for this change.  I looked at several conversion approaches,
but the ones that involved absolutely no changes at the customer end 
had other negative aspects for the customer and/or were too difficult
at the GCN end.  So I chose this approach that requires only
a minor change for the socket-based customers (and no change to them
of they don't want these TOO-initiated Swift Notices).  See the 2-line change
to the socket_demo program:  http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn/socket_demo.c

CONVERTION PROCEDURE:
In creating this new filtering functionality, I enabled all the sites
that already have the FOM or the SC_SLEW types enabled, respectively.
That way, those sites will continue to receive the exact same combination
of burst-initiated and TOO-initiated FOM & SC_SLEW notices that they are
already receiving.  If you are happy with that combined situation,
then there is nothing for you to do.

ACTION ITEM:
1) If you want to continue receiving these TOO-initiated notices,
there is nothing for you to do (I have aleady enabled them).
2) However, if you no longer want to receive the TOO-initiated variants,
then you need to reply to this announcement saying
you do not want either or both of the TOO-initiated variants of these
two notices.
3) And now it is possible to receive ONLY the TOO-initiated notices
if that is what you want.
4) Of course, you take this opportunity to request any other changes
to your site's configuration (see your current configuration below).
And don't forget that the Fermi-GBM Notices were added recently.

Sincerely,
Scott


Scott Barthelmy                      NASA-GSFC, Code 661, Greenbelt, MD  20771
PHONE:  301-286-3106                 (office)
PHONE:  301-346-3733                 (cell)
FAX:    301-286-1684                 (1st choice,  -1682 2nd choice)
EMAIL:  scott@lheamail.gsfc.nasa.gov
PAGER:  3013463733@cingularme.com
WEB:    http://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/gcn