How to Increase Your Signal Analyzer's Dynamic Range to See Low Level Signals - What the RF (S01E04)

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Transcript: No matter the signal type, whether it be simple CW signals or complex digitally-modulated signals, every signal has some amount of distortion. Signal distortion is important to characterize in your system because it can result in energy at unintended frequencies. However, being able to clearly see low-level signals is difficult to do, especially if they are buried beneath the noise floor of your signal analyzer. There are several ways to improve the dynamic range of a signal analyzer. Today we’ll discuss how you can optimize your signal analyzer’s dynamic range so that you can more easily see low-level signals.

In today’s episode we’re going to discuss signal analyzer resolution bandwidth.

One of the most frequently asked questions we get is “How can I get more dynamic range with my signal analyzer?”

One tool in your dynamic range toolkit is resolution bandwidth. So today, we’re going to talk about both the trade offs when setting resolution bandwidth on a signal analyzer and how it can help you to see low-level signals.

Every signal analyzer, like this one, has a certain amount of dynamic range, depending on how you define dynamic range. But what is exactly meant by that?

By definition, dynamic range is the ratio, expressed in dB, of the largest to the smallest signals simultaneously present at the input of the spectrum analyzer that allows the measurement of the smaller signal to a given degree of uncertainty. The signal of interest can either be harmonically or non harmonically related. The dynamic range specification determines whether or not low-level signals will be visible in the presence of large signals and therefore is one of the most important performance figures for a signal analyzer.

Another example of dynamic range can be seen in photography. If we compare these 2 photos that I took, the details in the shadows and highlights are lot less in the photo on the left taken with my phone, versus the one on the right taken with a DSLR camera. In fact, we can see an object sitting on top of our signal analyzer in the DSLR photo! We can confidently say that the DSLR ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtSxfxjiHQM