How to Make Channel Power Measurements

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Transcript You might be used to measuring power with a marker placed on a frequency peak, but that isn’t going to work for spread spectrum signals.

Hi, I’m Ally, and welcome to Ready, Set, Measure. Today, we’ll learn how to measure channel power for spread spectrum signals.

To measure the power of a continuous wave signal, all you have to do is add a marker at the peak of the signal. But, this doesn’t work for signals like this WCDMA signal.

Since the WCDMA signal is spread across a spectrum, the marker mistakenly reads off the power of the signal to be about minus 20 dBm, but we know the signal power is actually closer to 0 dBm. In this case, the marker tool isn’t reliable.

To find the power of this modulated signal we need to find the area under the curve, in other words, we need to integrate. But, an integration over this many frequencies, manually, is tedious and can be error prone.

If you don’t want to do it manually, you can use a signal analyzer’s built-in channel power measurement.

To be able to do this, all we have to do is input the center frequency and the integration bandwidth of our signal. Then the signal analyzer’s channel power measurement automatically calculates the total channel power and power spectral density.

So, in summary, if you want to measure the power of a spread spectrum signal, you either have to do manual calculations or use a signal analyzer with a channel power measurement.

#engineering #howto #rfmeasurements #rftest #signalanalyzer #signalanalysis #rf ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSPqw4_ByNI