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As a retired tech having used all those Tek and HP counter top monsters, playing around with these little-bitsy replacements looks like it might be interesting and fun.
I’m about to buy the SA-44B but have a few questions: 1 – Can the SA be used a SDR and will the various SDR packages work, i.e HDSR, SDR-Radio, etc..? 2 – Can the real time signal be recorded on the fly for later evaluation? 3 – Can the SA-44 be synced or adjusted to track an adjusting signal generator for filter evaluation? (hence the # 2 question of recording, so I can see the results of hand sweeping a signal through the range of interest) Thanks in advance of any advice/help you can give. Mike
Hi,
Yes the SA can be used as an SDR. Info about that is elsewhere on this forum. As far as I know it is only functional with HDSDR.
https://signalhound.com/news/hdsdr-software-your-signal-hound-software-radio/
Look around on the forum.If you want to sweep filters and such then the best bet is to get the companion tracking generator TG44. I have very successfully used this combo to tune up cavity filters and even sweep antennas for resonance.
As far as recording, I don’t recall SPIKE doing that but HDSDR certainly will.
John
Just looked in the manual and yes, SPIKE will record. Top of page 18.
Hi Catshot,
The SA44B is compatible with HDSDR. We provide the files and information necessary for setup on the SA44 downloads page. HDSDR can record the full bandwidth of the device continuously (~250kHz bandwidth) and can be played back through the HDSDR software.
Our software (Spike) can record sweeps indefinitely to a file which can be later brought back into the Spike software.
If you have programming experience, our spectrum analyzers all have a C interface and could easily interface a number of SDR programs with a bit of work. This also include professional environments such as Labview, Matlab, GNU radio, etc.
The SA44B is only compatible with our tracking generators. With the SA44/TG44 pair, you can sweep filters across the full frequency range.
Let me know if you have follow up questions.
Regards,
A.J.Hand sweeping continuously is not so good, as the software will detect the changing signal as spur and remove it. So you need to pause your sweep regularly to let the software determine the signal is valid.
Also you could turn off the spur detection – of course you then may have issues with spurious and images appearing.Max hold is available, which would avoid having to capture the trace and post-process it. With spur detect turned on it takes more patience to ‘fill in’ the trace though.
Catshot – before I got the tracking generator, I had some good results using manual sweeping. I used the SA44b with a Marconi 2024 sig gen, letting the analyser run at whatever rate it chose and manually stepping the generator. Sometimes I had to go over the sweep again with a smaller step size to fill in a few ‘holes’.
With careful choice of RBW and step size it is possible to get good results, but it is s-l-o-w!Oops, forgot to say you need to engage ‘max hold’ to do this. Obvious really!
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