Automated EMC Quasi Peak Measurements

Hi

I’m a bit new to using the EMC part of Spike. I have a BB60A and I need to measure a list of frequencies for Quasi Peak. Is there a way to create a list and load it and have the software measure them and report their values? Right now the only way I see how to do it is manually typing the frequencies and using the start/stop and loading the result list with the results. Is there a way to automate this? It would also be nice if you could do a peak scan and then have the software go back and automatically perform quasi peaks for the frequencies which are appear on the peak table. Is there a way to do this?

[Andrew]

Hi pmerana,

Currently there is no way to automate the quasi peak measurements. It must be done manually as you say. I think this is a good suggestion and it might be something we can add to our software in the future.

Side note: In addition to setting the QP frequency manually, you can select a spur in the peak table list and move the spur frequency to the quasi peak frequency entry with the “Selected Spur to Meter” button. You can do this while the QP measurement is active, and you can move the QP measurement to the meter readings table with the “To List” button while the QP measurement is active as well.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for the feedback.

Regards,
Andrew

• This reply was modified 8 years ago by Andrew.

Hi Andrew

Can you all please add this? The company just purchased a Siglent SSA3000 and their EMI tool does this. Also when I have been in EMI labs the SW pretty much did the same thing.. Find the peaks above a level and go back and perform quasi peak on those. The Siglent can not sweep anywhere near as fast but there are trade offs.

Thank you for the quick reply.

Hi,
I also would love to see this feature being added.

Just did my first EMC pre-compliance experiments with my BB60A.

Doing QP measurements for the identified spurs needs a lot of clicks, especially when exporting the values for documentation.

My current workflow:
1. Sweep and identify spurs
For each relevant spur:
1. Use “Spur to Meter” Button to initiate measurement
2. Let it run for a defined time
3. Record values/Export screenshot of the bar meter

It would be so great to have a row in the limit tables to define a QP “sweep time” for each frequency range, so this could be fully automated.

Of course, CSV exports of the results would be very handy 😉

Greetings,
Manuel

Hello,
4 years later and this feature is still sorely missing. I’m sorry but this is the reason why I can’t recommend Signal Hound analyzers to colleagues and friends for EMC testing. Although otherwise I very much like the BB60C that we have…

jpetrik,

Thank you for the feedback. I agree this would be a useful feature. Would a button that automatically performs the QP measurement on all current peaks in the peak table satisfy your workflow requirements?

Regards

Hello Andrew,
the description provided by Manuel seems reasonable as first approximation. I’ll be doing more EMC testing early next week, I’ll be keeping notes for you and share them with you when the measurement session is over.

On a related note – ability to copy spectrum directly to my clipboard would be greatly appreciated as well. Now I use windows snippets, but if there was a shortcut that would put spectrum screen and possible peak table into clipboard(possibly a menu item that would appear after RMB click on the sub window?), that would be great.

Thank you,
Jan

Jan,

The automated meter measurements are being actively worked on. Look for this in the next release of Spike.

I’ve added your copy screen request to our request log.

Regards

Hello Andrew,
thanks for the good news! Sorry my priorities got shuffled and I only just got to the EMC session I was talking about.
As for my workflow, I set trace type to max hold, have it run for a while, sort the peak tably by lowest margin from the limit, and then manually export spur to meter, and meter to list for each one.

I was exploring the other parts of Spike(so far I used it only for EMC), and in the sweep mode, I really loved the traces section. Would it be possible to bring those to EMC view? I could use those to compare effects of different EMC mitigations in single view. Or a different working regimes of DUT.
Also having both current sweep and max hold trace in one view would be valuable as well.
It would be great if I could name the traces, and the trace name in trace color would appear in the spectrum view.

Cheers,
Jan

Thanks for the feature requests Jan. I appreciate the detailed feedback. I enumerated all of your requests in our request log, I can’t make any guarantees as to when we would be able to implement these.

Regards,
Andrew

Hello,
I’ve just purchased the BB60D, mainly for EMC precompliance purposes.
As other forum community told, is there a way to test the Quasi peak measurement in an automatic way? From what I’ve seen, you can tell the device in the “Peak Table” to scan for spuries, but these peaks are much lower than the data calculated in the Meter tab, where the three bars with peak, QP and average are displayed.
Is there a way to press a button and then get QP and AVG waveform be calculated? Also is there a way to display two waveforms, one with QP measurement (or Peak and QP for failing spurs) and another with AVG measurement, each with their own limits?
Thanks,
Mattia Berton

Hello Mattia,

For the sweep measurement, only avg/max detectors are available. The QP measurements are relegated to single frequency measurements only. The workflow would ideally be, using a peak detector, finding all frequencies that exceed your limit, then testing those frequencies separately using the QP detector, one frequency at a time. In theory the reading from a peak detector will always be equal/greater than a QP detector. You’re saying you are seeing a larger value from the QP measurement than the peak detector. It might be the sweep isn’t dwelling long enough to characterise the signal. The dwell time can be modified on the sweep to help with this in the range table.

Hello Andrew,
thanks for the prompt answer, let me attach an image to better explain.
As you can see in the image, I’ve done these steps:
– Run a peak sweep
– In “Peak Table”, clicked scan for spuries
– In the meter readings, all spuries have been scanned. One of these, 480.957031 kHz has been tested with the Meter settings tab, but as you can see, the Quasi-Pk table in “Meter readings” gives 31.53 dBuV, while the QP detector of meter settings gives 46.66 dBuV. This mismatch is always present.
What is the cause of this mismatch?

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

You might need to increase the meter settings meas time. Try 1+ seconds. This will then be closer to the measurement you are seeing when you are dwelling at just one frequency with the meter enabled. When doing the auto scan, each frequency is only measured for the specified meas time.

[Author]

Posts