Screen for spectrum analyser

Hi ,
I am actually trying to design a spectrum analyser,
is anybody knows if it s possible to use a computer sreen (insted of an oscilloscope) to sweep the Power vs frequency?

I am finishing to build the spectrum analyzer from Matiaz Vidmar
( Link at : http://www.elektroda.pl/eboard/viewt...=149926#149926 ), but I use a Oscilloscope display.

I have made some trials with the display shown in this page:

- http://www.qsl.net/pa3ckr/xydisplay/index.html

If you have some ideas let me know.

Mandi

Anything is possible, but you will have to do a *lot* of work for this. An oscilloscope-type display is a vector display (X-Y), whereas any computer or TV monitor is a raster display (lines of dots).

Driving an X-Y display for this application is quite easy, just using analogue techniques. Driving a raster would require that you digitise the information, form a full-frame image in memory, then send this in the appropriate format to the monitor. Much more difficult.

Personally, if you really want a monitor display, I would digitise the frequency versus power sweep and pipe it into a PC using USB (or a fast digital input card). Then you can write code to display it nicely.

An alternative - look for a large X-Y display screen, often seen on eBay and quite cheap. These are essentially a bare-bones oscilloscope with just basic defelection circuits. This will give you a much bigger screen than an oscilloscope and you could probably build the SA cicuitry into the display box.

Cheers,
FoxyRick.

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