As we mentioned above, observations with the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) were performed quasi-simultaneously with XMM-Newton. Starting before XMM-Newton, the RXTE observations cover most of the XMM-Newton observation, albeit with a much worse sampling due to the low Earth orbit of the satellite (Fig. 1, red line).
We extracted the RXTE data following standard procedures (employing
LHEASOFT 5.2), using the newest instrument calibrations. To avoid
times of high background count rates, only data taken more than
10minutes after passages through the South Atlantic Anomaly were
considered, with the additional constraint that the ``electron
ratio'', a measure for the particle background in the PCA, was less
than 0.1. As MCG
6-30-15 is a rather faint source for the nonimaging
instruments on RXTE, we concentrate on the data from RXTE's low energy
instrument, the proportional counter array (PCA), only. Due to
calibration uncertainties, only PCA data in the energy range from
3keV to 15keV were used.