Shoutout for Waterfall Spectrum View

Don’t know how long its been in Spike, but I recently discovered the “Waterfall Spectrum View”. It’s AWESOME! A hearty well-done whoever put together that feature! It’s now become my number one go-to when I switch to zero span in Spike. I’ve used it to look at the spectra of individual Mode A/C/S & ADS-B bursts at 1090 MHz, demonstrate FM and FSK, and understand ramp up, sync, and ramp down in burst transmissions.
Again, excellent!

Thanks for the feedback Gary, glad you’re liking it! I think it’s our RF engineers favorite view as well.

Where is the waterfall view tucked away? I have seen screenshots of it from a BB60C in the past, but I have yet to figure out where to switch to it from the flat spectogram view. Am I missing something obvious?

Andy,

Gary was referring to the waterfall view in zero-span mode. Once in zero-span mode use the “Add Measurement” button in the upper left of the application to add a water fall plot. It shows you a very dense spectrogram plot over the duration of the time domain capture, usually overlapping FFTs by 90% or more depending on settings.

In sweep mode, it’s just a matter of clicking the “spectrogram” checkbox in the upper left as well. Same general functionality, less overlap between lines in the plot as compared to zero-span.

Speaking of which, maybe we should be a bit more consistent in our naming.

All of our waterfall/spectrogram views are “flat” 2D plots, if that is what you were referring to.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Thanks, Andrew. I’ve definitely seen screenshots of 3D waterfalls from Spike, is that not a thing anymore?

(See, for example, Jason Glass’s screenshot and video capture at the top of http://www.plsystem.com/pl_spectrum-page.htm – I know you can basically see the same wiggly modulation in a 2D spectrogram, but it’s a lot easier to visualize what it’s doing through time in that 3D graph, in my opinion. Might just be the way my brain is wired, though…)

Andy,

The 3D waterfall was removed in 2017. We decided to add more features to the 2D waterfall instead of supporting both moving forward.

Regards

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