Fast Power Measurements for X-Series Signal Analyzers
Application Notes
Overview of Fast Power Measurements
Fast Power is available for the UXA, PXA, EXA, and MXA Series Signal Analyzers (N9040B, N9041B, N9030B, N9020B, N9021B, and N9010B). By using an FPGA hardware-based FFT engine built on the digital IF, measurement times are significantly decreased and repeatability for a given acquisition time is improved when compared to traditional sweep-based power measurements.
Fast Power is supported by the 40 MHz digitizer (option B40) as well as the wideband digitizers up to 510 MHz bandwidth. For digitizer paths from 10 MHz to 40 MHz, the embedded FFT engine uses RMS power averaging. For digitizer paths greater than 40 MHz, only voltage averaging is available. Fast Power measurements can be performed as quickly as 10 ms per acquisition. This equates to one hundred FFT measurements and results returned per second. Adjacent channel power (ACP) or channel power measurements can be made over the entire digitizer bandwidth at once. Fast Power provides the fastest method to perform power measurements for X-Series Analyzers.
Fast Power measurements can be performed using SCPI commands with a stream-lined interface to directly setup and perform measurements without a graphic interface. Additionally, some X-Series measurement applications such as 5G NR allow the Fast Power Measurements engine to be selected inside the Adjacent Channel Power one-button measurement.