This is a personal note about PdBI/IRAM spectral data reduction. The steps will start from transferring the raw data to the local hard-drive, organising raw data, calibration with 
to the further data reduction with 
procedure. The final stage will be mapping and acquire the spectra. If you have any questions or comments, please feeling free to contact me.
PART I: Get Data Ready (Get proj, etc.)
Now, let’s take a high-z observation project for example. Assuming we have observed a molecular line of a high-z galaxy in 2012. So our project name (starting from 2014, a new proposal system called PMS took over the old one, the project naming system has also been changed) would be:
W0B4
W is 2012, V is for 2011 and X is for 2013, etc. I guess there’s a loop of the letters starts from a certain date; 0 is for the target index in this proposal, it could be WAB4, WBB4 and WCB4, …; B4 is the project index, 16th, hexadecimal.
And also we have an observation project name containing the data information, and it could be:
XC12
Just as the proposed project code X represents the year “2013”, C stands for December, the hexadecimal form of the month; 12: the date 12th.
Thus the raw data file of one observation will be like this:
XC12WAB4.IPB, XC12WAB4.OBS, XC12WAB4.RDI
for the source, WAB4 observed on Dec 12th, 2013. IPB file contains the data scan by scan, and OBS & RDI files store the observation parameters.
Now we need to download the data from IRAM data centre to the computers that we perform data reduction (usually at IRAM-HQ) by using:
getproj -p w0b4 -s wab4
The data (subproject wab4 from project w0b4) will be downloaded to the “~/tmp/DATA” directory (actually, it’s a link to the “/scratch/DATA” directory).
You will need to create several directories for data calibration. Usually, they will be generated automatically after getting the project, the calibration directory is under ~/calib, such as
$HOME/calib/w0b4/wab4 $HOME/calib/w0b4/wbb4 ...
And also there is a ~/reports directory containing some very useful notes from DoA for performing better calibration, and a ~/map for storing the results from your further data analysis.
After all, these get ready, you can now move on to the data calibration.