Synthetic instruments extract masked signal parameters

We have reviewed the signal conditioning required to obtain high-quality spectral measurements with an FFT-based spectrum analyzer. The conditioning includes data windowing and extended length. Folded windows are required at the input to the transform, and significant ensemble averaging of power spectrum and cross power spectrum at the output of the FFT is needed. We also commented on the effect of cross coupling between signal and noise terms on the variance of the spectral output terms when the signal contains both spectral lines and additive noise. Finally, we presented techniques based on cross spectra. In particular, the normalized cross spectra known as the coherence function was shown as a technique to separate spectral components traceable to the input signal from those not traceable to the input signal.