Another Synchronization Question

I have two SM200B’s running in queued fast sweep mode. I’d like to keep them relatively sync’d up — can I use the trigger inputs or anything else to put them roughly in sync, and/or out-of sync (doesn’t need to be perfect, just better than free-running), or do queued fast-sweeps just go?

Thanks!

Basically, queued fast sweeps just go. Unfortunately there is a little bit of uncertainty each time the LO changes. We check to see if it has settled, and add a few microseconds delay if it has not, so even if they started in sync it would not last.

We could add this to our list of feature requests. Most likely this would be a feature we would add to a future product (multi-channel receiver) due to the complexities of synchronizing two standalone devices.

If you could scan your spectrum more slowly, 40 MHz at a time, you could use I/Q streaming and a shared external trigger to get them sync’d within a handful of nanoseconds.

Thanks Justin. That was my worry 🙂

It makes things quite a bit more complicated code-wise on my end, but I think still manageable…It would be nice if I could queue and get everything ready, then trigger both to start the queued sweeps electrically, rather than via software. I could stop every now and then for a re-alignment after drift due to them just going full bore.

My bandwidth I’m monitoring is ~200MHz, so unfortunately streaming options are out for me…

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