Virtins Sound Card Spectrum Analyzer Description:

Virtins Sound Card Spectrum Analyzer is a powerful PC based virtual instrument. It consists of a sound card real time oscilloscope and a sound card real time spectrum analyzer and can run them concurrently. Unlike most of the sound card oscilloscopes in the market which search trigger event after data collection, it features a specially designed data acquisition approach which is able to monitor the input signal continuously without missing any trigger event before the frame of data is collected. As a result, Virtins Sound Card Spectrum Analyzer boasts a very fast screen refresh rate (typically 50 frame per second) and thus a truly real time response. It supports sophisticated triggering method including pre-trigger and post-trigger which are generally missing from other sound card based instruments. 1. The dual-channel Oscilloscope, with all of the features of a modern digital storage oscilloscope, provides four types of views: (1) Real time wave form display of Channel A and Channel B. (2) Real time wave form display of Channel A + Channel B. (3) Real time wave form display of Channel A - Channel B. (4) Real time Lissajous Pattern display for Channel A and Channel B. 2. The dual-channel Spectrum Analyzer provides four types of views: (1) Real time Amplitude Spectrum display. (2) Real time Phase Spectrum display. (3) Real time Auto Correlation display. (4) Real time Cross Correlation display. with adjustable FFT points ranging from 128 to 32768 and selectable windowing functions such as Rectangle, Triangle, Hanning, Hamming, Blackman.
Frequency Range: up to 96 KHz (depending on Sound Card)

Bandwidth: 10 Hz - 96 kHz (depending on Sound Card)

Maximum Allowable Input Voltage (if connected directly): about 2 VAC (depending on Sound Card)

Selectable sampling frequency (up to 192 kHz), sampling bit resolution (8, 16 or 24 bits) and sampling channels (one or two) (all depending on Sound Card)

Four triggering modes: no trigger, repeated trigger, single trigger and slow trigger

Support triggering by leading edge or trailing edge at specified triggering level and on selected input channel

Support pre-triggering and post triggering from 0 to 100% of the selected record length

Continuously monitor the input signal such that no trigger event is missed before data collection

Can be used as a transient signal recorder to capture and store data for up to 500 s

Four view types: Real time amplitude spectrum display, Real time phase spectrum display, Real time auto correlation display, Real time cross correlation display

Independent X axis and Y axis zooming and scrolling

In amplitude spectrum display, Y axis supports relative display modes in linear and dBr scale, and absolute display mode in RMS voltage, dBV and dBu scale. X axis supports linear, logarithmic, octave, 1/3 octave, 1/6 octave, 1/12 octave and 1/24 octave scale

WAV file can be imported for display and analysis

Collected measurement data can be saved as WAV file or exported as TXT file

Data curve can be printed out directly or saved as BMP file

Support calibration of the input channels for different gain settings

Support adding notes to the measurement data

Fast display refresh rate: about 50 frames per second (tested under Windows XP SP2 on IBM ThinkPad R51 Laptop PC with Intel (R) Pentium (R) M processor 1.60 GHz, with scan time=10 ms and FFT size=1024 and both Oscilloscope and Spectrum Analyzer running under "no trigger" mode). Thus data are displayed and analyzed in "true" real time

The colors of display are configurable

Number of points to be collected per scan can be fine tuned at one point's resolution

FFT size can be adjusted from 128 to 32768 points

Allow record length to be different from FFT size. If the FFT size is greater than the record length, then zero will be added at the end of the actual measurement data during FFT computation. If the FFT size is less than the record length, then the measurement data will be split into different segments with the size of each segment equal to the FFT size. The final result will be obtained by averaging the FFT results from all segments

Support windowing functions: Rectangle, Triangle, Hanning, Hamming and Blackman

Display the peak frequency, Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), THD+Noise (THD+N), Signal in Noise and Distortion (SINAD), Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and cross correlation peak location and correlation coefficient

Support one cursor reader and two markers which stick to the measurement data

Options are provided to remove the DC component during spectrum analysis

Three inter-frame processing methods: None, Peak Hold, Averaging

Five chart types: Line, Scatter, Column, Bar, and Step

Support Multilingual User Interface under Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and above. Currently supported languages are English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Support only the local language and English under Window 95, 98, Me and Windows NT