Power Spectrum

General description

The FFT analyzer displays the signal power spectral density function. The x- axis is the frequency in kHz. The y –axis is the signal power in decibel scale. The power is scaled so that the maximum possible input power of the selected input device corresponds to zero level.

There are two sliders on the right side of the FFT window. The left slider is used to set the middle position of the window. The right slider is used to set the dynamic range. The left mouse button is used for zooming. When the left mouse button is pressed, the selected frequency is shown on the bottom of the FFT window.

 

Display Settings

The popup menu is activated when the right mouse button is pressed on the top of the view area. The popup menu contains the following menu items:

 

Stop / Start

The display can be started or stopped using this menu item.

 

Auto Scale

The window area is scaled automatically according to the signal

 

Zoom Out

The display area is scaled back to the original size. Use this selection when you want to scale ‘backwards’

 

Grid

Selected grid lines are drawn.

 

LogX

The selected x –axis is drawn in logarithmic scale. It is a useful display mode for example for speech signal. Zooming is not supported in this display mode.

 

Average

If selected, the power spectrum function is averaged on time. Using this display mode, it is easier to see which frequencies contain energy, but fast changes are not shown.

Maximum

If selected, the maximum values are maintained.

 

Update Interval

Opens an update interval dialog, which is used to set the signal view update rate.

 

Properties

Opens the power spectrum properties dialog. The resolution of the power spectrum display can be selected between 512, 1024 and 2048 samples. The bigger the value the better is the resolution in the frequency domain. The resolution depends on the sampling frequency too. The average IIR factor parameter is used as IIR gain factor in the averaging process. It is used only when the averaging is on. The smaller gain factor means that new values have less gain compared to the old values.

 

Copy to Clipboard

Copies the window to the clipboard.

 

Help

Gives information about FFT analyzer.