It’s no secret: the wireless world is hot. From the top tech companies in the world to homebrew hackers working in their basement, wireless communications are changing the world in exciting ways. Working with radio frequency is standard fare for many in the electronics world, and there are many tools available to help when developing the myriad of electronic devices.
Essential in the toolkit of anyone working in this field is the spectrum analyzer. And, since we think we know a thing or two about spectrum analyzers (we build a few of them, after all), we decided to produce a blog series titled Understanding Real Time Spectrum Analysis to help those curious about these amazing devices and how to use them.
Over the course of the next few weeks, you’ll learn some of the essentials of spectrum analysis as seen through the lens of Signal Hound product developers, although the techniques are applicable to the field of spectrum analysis in general.
All posts in this series
- Part One: Introduction To Practical Spectrum Analysis
- Part Two: Spectrum Analyzer Basics
- Part Three: What Is Channel Power And Occupied Bandwidth?
- Part Four: What You Need to Know About Real Time Spectrum Analysis
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2 Comments
We are trying to use your USB-SA44 for taking some antenna patters using the unit’s zero span feature. This antenna pattern test takes several minutes and measures a CW tone from the test antenna while is it rotated +/- 180 degrees in azimuth. The resulting trace on a zero spanned spectrum analyzer is the antenna’s azimuth gain patter. The problem we see with the SA44’s is that zero span mode looks to only go up to 1000 milliseconds and we need a trace/file that is more like 300 -500 seconds long with a 0.25 sec sweep rate (1200-2000 samples). Is there any way to lengthen the sweep time on the SA44 while in zero span?
In the process of notifying the engineers about your comment, they told me that you called in and discussed this over the phone… thanks for doing that! If you have any more questions, you know where to find us 😉