Specifications
8 Z-Family Techncial Reference Manual
the raw data files begin with the letter “B”, so they are referred to as B-Files. A list of 
the files is shown in Table 2.1.
In order to maximize data storage capability, certain files are recorded on the data 
card in a compressed format and are decompressed during the download process. So 
in the workday directory of the data card, a V-file is a compressed B-file, a Y-file is a 
compressed S-file, and a W-file is a compressed C-file.
File Naming Convention
The files are automatically named according to a naming convention that includes the 
site name, session, and day of the year. Figure 2.2 outlines the file naming 
convention. The one exception are almanac files that are named ALMyy.ddd where 
yy are the last two digits of the year and ddd is the day of the year.
• The first letter of each file name is the file type B, V, W, E, M, Y, S, C, or D.
• The next 4 characters of each file name is the site ID. If the user has not 
entered a site ID during the course of the recording session then these 4 
 Table 2.1: File Types
File Type Description Format
B-file Raw data-generally code and carrier phase data, 
position data, and SITE ID
Binary
E-file Satellite ephemeris data Binary
S-file Site information data ASCII
C-file Position Data ASCII
M-file Event Marker files (photogrammetry) ASCII
D-file Site attribute files ASCII
ALMyy.ddd Almanac file Binary
 Figure 2.2: Z-Family File Naming Convention










