I/Q-samples Export for signals wider than 40 MHz using RSA306B

RSA306B has 40MHz wide real-time acquisition bandwidth, and one can export I/Q-samples associated with the bandwidth to a file for processing in another tool. What we would like to do is to capture a signal which is 800MHz wide and process this offline. What’s the best way to do this? We understand that RSA306B scans 40MHz at a time to do a stitched spectrum, so we think there must be a way to capture each 40MHz scan data. If recording the raw I/Q-samples is not possible, is there a way to record the spectrum information of the 800 MHz signal for post-processing?

Thank you very much for all your help and advice with this.

Ediz
 

Thanks Alfonso.

My thinking was, given that we can already transfer ~40MHz worth of spectral data for each scan, can we do the same for the raw data for each scan. Based on your response, I guess the answer to my question is no for RSA306B. By the way, we also have a RSA5126B. I wonder if that can transfer such files? 

Hi Ediz,

IQ sample data is real-time data, so you cannot capture more than 40 MHz of it in real-time with the RSA306B. The RSA5126B can do up to 160 MHz.
The only RSA that can do 800 MHz is the RSA7100A/B.


If you don't need real-time data, then you can set your span to 800 MHz and then save the trace data as a .specan file (which is really just an XML file that you can open up as a text file and get each point).
Obviously, this will not work well if your signal varies with time since the RSA's you have need to sweep to do an 800 MHz span.

Thank you very much Afonso. Can one save the time domain data that way as well? Form what I can see the .specan file contains the frequnecy domain information. 

 

Yes, under the "Save As" menu, you can select several ways to save the acquisition (tiq, csv, mat, etc), which will save the time domain data as IF or IQ data.

You can also use the SCPI interface to get this data programmatically.