Hello All,
I am using PNA-8361A in my setup. The PNA is used sweep averaging to calculate the averaged value.
Is there any way to measure/estimate the total data acquisition time for an averaging factor of N? Let's say one sweep time takes 30 ms.
It takes about 10 seconds for the averaging factor of 64 to display the result on the screen. However, I need to estimate the data acquisition time which only takes to perform the measurement with the averaging factor of 64 (Should it be T_total=30ms*64?)
Thanks in advance
The sweep time in the sweep menu is a very good approximation of the actual data acquisition time, so if you are only interested in the total data acquisition time when doing sweep averages, then it will be N x Sweep Time. As you have already noted, the data processing time to actually update the result on the screen is longer than the data acquisition time and if you want to reduce the overhead processing time, you can do a couple of things:
1- use the group trigger with the group number set to be the same as the number of sweep averages. this will ensure that a single trigger is all you need to perform all the sweeps for the averaging.
2- disable the display update before triggering the sweeps. this is especially useful if you are remotely controlling the PNA and don't require to be looking at the display while the data is being acquired and processed.
even with these steps, there will still be some overhead processing time, but the total time will be much closer the computed data acquisition time.