Spike – suggestions

Why Spike display have information about number of point in seconds? I do not see any valid use of that numbers.
It will be nice to see the following modification in Spike GUI and functionality:
1. Show Sweep Time.
2. Allow control of sweep time (right now only zero span have sweep time control)
2. Show number of points
3. Allow control to number of points.
4. Automatically detect connected external 10MHz reference (when disconnected – default internal)
4. When you do “Preset” do not re-connect, just re-load default setting. Reconnect should have separate button.
5. Allow user to remote control Spike GUI.
6. Allow user to remotely, read from Spike GUI (settings, trace, markers values…)
Signal Hound did such great job in making Spike GUI, why not take advantage of that job and allow user to remotely control the Spectrum Analyzer thru that application. Most of the vendors of equipment do so thru there app? Direct remote hardware control is good option to have; however in current market environment it is not most important thing. Remote access to Spike GUI should be top priority for Signal Hound, as it will simplify interfacing the Spectrum Analyzer to customer software.
Regards,
Mirek

Hello Mirek,

Thank you for the feedback. I can comment on some of your points.

1. The “N points in M ms” display you are referring to shows the number of points in the sweep as well as the amount of time it took to acquire and plot the sweep. ‘M’ in this display is the sweep time.
2A. There is a sweep time control in the ‘Acquisition’ section of the sweep settings control panel. You can find this on the lower right of the application window (assuming you havent moved the control panels from their default position. Keep in mind, for a digital FFT analyzer we define sweep time as the total acquisition time for the sweep. It will not match the sweep time displayed on the graticule as that sweep time will include processing and display time in addition to acquisition time.
2B. See #1 above. ‘N’ in this display is the number of points.
3. You cannot control the number of points directly in our software. Only indirectly through the RBW and span settings. Sweep size is roughly going to be equal to 5*(span/RBW) for the flat top window. Other spectrum analyzers that allow you to control the sweep size are doing so by ‘binning’ adjacent frequency points. We do not do this, so when you go to export/record the sweep you still have the full resolution from the original sweep.
4A. This is a good suggestion but would require additional hardware development to perform and thus we won’t be able to offer this on our current spectrum analyzer line up.
4B. To load the default settings only, use the Presets->Load Default Settings control. This will retain your current measurment mode, but will go back to power on settings. To fully reset to power on state, set the analysis mode to Sweep and hit the “Load Default Settings” file menu selection.
5. This is a good suggestion and we have considered adding this functionality to Spike. We do not have a current time frame on this functionality, but it is something we are very much interested in. Most likely we will add this through a SCPI backend in the Spike software.
6. I agree this will be useful functionality when we add this. If you were not aware, we do have programming interfaces for our spectrum analyzers. They are in the form of C DLLs for Windows. Currently customers who need remote/programmatic control of our receivers use these DLLs to develop out thier needs. I realize this is not as convenience as an ethernet SCPI aware Spike application, but it is something we currently offer.

Thank you very much for your feedback. Let me know if you have additional questions or comments.

Regards,
Andrew

Hello Andrew
Thank you for the response.

1.With center frequency 6.5GHz and span 1GHz the Spike show “35000 pts in 35ms”. It do not looks like it is a sweep (35ms). What I can estimate it is around 8s.
Very small difference 🙂
2A. You are right, I miss that sweep time settings, now I see.
Changing the value of sweep time do not affect the sweep time, unfortunately.
Changing Sweep Intervals affect the sweep time. The 35ms in the above paragraphs looks like it is sweep intervals. What are intervals? FFT acquisition window time? I am little confuse about that.
Min Sweep Time 1ms max 1s. Spike do not accept number below 1ms and above 1s. The intervale do not have that constrain.
3. Your explanation is very clear why Spike have not such setting. I work with Agilent/Keysight Spectrum Analyzers, that why I mention number of point.
4A. Let hope we will see the one of your newer model in the future.
4B. The loading the Default Setting little to hidden. I will put that in front with Preset button. You probably will use more often default setting then preset button. I always assume thet the preset button is the default setting.

Best Regards,
Mirek

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Hello Mirek,

Thank you for the follow up.

Regarding the sweep time, I did forget that the SA44 and SA124 units do behave slightly differently. Unfortunately, the SA44/SA124 do not have a selectable sweep time, mainly because there are heavy restrictions on how the unit sweeps which limits us to very specific configurations for given RBWs and spans. These limitations are in hardware/firmware. Because of this, the sweep time parameter is ignored for these devices. Additionally the sweep time printout on the graticule is updated each time the screen is refreshed with new sweep data. So yes, as you mention, for the wide and long sweeps on the SA44/SA124 this number will not represent the total sweep time. Apologies for the confusion. For our BB60C and for narrower sweeps in the SA44/SA124, then the sweep is updated in its entirety each screen update and thus that number is more representative of the overall sweep time.

Regards,
Andrew

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