Energy

COMTRADE records

Read COMTRADE disturbance records of 1991, 1999 and 2013: analog and digital lanes, two cursors with values and differences, phasors at a cursor, and the digital events in time order.

State: modelled. The reader is checked value by value against python-comtrade, an independent reader, on 8 real records of 5 to 301 samples (ASCII, 1999 binary with missing samples, ISO 8859-1 text, .cff in ASCII and float32). The viewer has not been seen on a real record of realistic size.

Open a record

Open a .cfg or .cff file with Reopen Editor With... > COMTRADE Record, or run Open COMTRADE Record (title bar, or Ctrl+Shift+Alt+F) and pick it.

Read: revisions 1991, 1999 and 2013; .cfg with .dat (any letter case), or single-file .cff; ASCII, 16-bit and 32-bit binary and float32 data; several sampling rates; time-stamped records; missing samples are read as missing, not as zero.

Read the record

Lanes: analog and digital channels against time, with the trigger mark.
Cursors: click for cursor A, Shift+click for cursor B. The value of every channel at A and at B, and the difference.
Phasors: the RMS, angle and total RMS of each phase at cursor A, from the cycle before it.
Events: the digital events in time order, with the channels that left their normal state marked.
Zoom and pan: mouse wheel or + and - to zoom, drag to pan, Home to fit the record.
Channels: a checkbox hides a channel.

The phasor is a single-cycle calculation at the nominal frequency. It is labelled as the module's own: not a relay's filter, and not sign-off.

Try it: a sample feeder fault record shows IA, IB and IC rising about eight times at 50 ms, the trigger mark at 50 ms, TRIP rising at 75 ms, and READY low from 50 ms to 125 ms. The same record as a binary .cff shows the same.

Names in other code pages

Records whose channel names are not UTF-8 open in Windows-1252. The Text button offers 14 code pages (among them 1250 and 1251); the choice is kept per file and used by the agent tools too.

Export for a test set

Export Record... writes the time between the cursors with the channels shown, in the revision, format and rate you choose. See Hand off to a test set.

Size

A generated record of 64 channels at 4 kHz for 10 seconds reads in 0.25 s. Drawing uses min/max decimation.

Limits

Two records cannot be compared.
There is no frequency or harmonic view.

Not verified

Real records from a relay at realistic size; several sampling rates, time-stamped records, 1991 records and more than 16 digital channels in a real record.
The float32 missing-sample marker (from a secondary source).
The drawing by image comparison; Windows.

Last reviewed 18 October 2026View as Markdown