White Paper: Understanding The Perils Of Spectrum Analyzer Power Averaging

By Steve Murray, Keithley Instruments

The following article explores the issues associated with power averaging in order to help readers avoid making the same mistaken assumptions the author did. The conclusions presented here are the results of an experiment that involved correlating the power measurements of two spectrum analyzers from different vendors. However, the issues discussed are generic in the sense that they apply to any spectrum analyzer power measurement with some form of post-detection averaging.