BB60C: automate stop and start Spike SHR recodings

Hi, I have a fleet of BB60C/D (QTY 27) units connected to antennas to monitor for receive in-band interference & signal quality. Occasionally we have to do long term monitoring and have the units recording 24/7. We have the unit connected to an RF switch to allow us to monitor either the LHCP or RHCP coming from the antennas. What I want to do is automate the following processes:

1. We have to log into the remote PC and manually stop and start the recording each day.

2. We have to manually change the file name of the recording each time to indicate if we’re on LHCP or RHCP pol. I’d like to be able to automate the naming of the file as well to represent that info. The remote PC has visibility into the state of the RF switch.

I would normally automate something like this with SCPI commands, but it seems that the SHR recording functions have no SCPI commands available. Also I was not able to find out how to interface with the SHR recording functions through the API.

Ideally I’d like to use SHR recordings instead of a custom API recording implementation as they already hold all of the data I need + they have your wonderful spike UI for playback. If I had to write a custom recording file through the API, I can guarantee my playback method would not be as pretty.

If you guys have any advice on what I should do, please let me know. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

You are correct. The sweep recordings cannot currently be controlled via SCPI. This has been requested before and is something we hope to add to our software in a future release.

Until we can add this to the software, there might be another solution. You could use the API and store the data in the SHR file format. Located in the SDK, you can find an example SHR file parser project. From this project, you can learn about the file format and use the API to retrieve sweeps to store in your own SHR files.

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