Discussion and technical support related to USRP, UHD, RFNoC
View all threadsTo emphasize on what the other Marcus said:
GNU Radio only knows numbers, not physical units. The USRP delivers
numbers, relative to full ADC range, to the computer. What these numbers
represent depends on a lot of factors, most of which are in the analog
domain and different for every device, every application etc.
Now, the USRPs and their daughterboards are pretty linear for a very
large range of powers [1], so you can measure once with a signal source
of known power (a /standard/), and derive a factor between "digital
number power" and "physical receiver power" for a given
frequency/bandwidth/gain/sample rate/antenna/... configuration, as long
as the powers you observe don't leave the linear range (again, [1]).
Problem is: OFDM is notorious for having a large dynamic range due to
its potentially high PAPR. Usually, you configure your receiver gain so
that it gets a high signal power out of OFDM symbols that have a modest
PAPR, because it's not as bad to lose a bit of precision with a symbol
that has an extreme PAPR as to constantly have bad SNR. Now, for exactly
these high-PAPR symbols, your receiver gets pushed into nonlinearity,
and then your power estimate will be a little too low (if you're not
really tricky about correcting that, but that would be very close to
equalization based on data knowledge, and has little to do with receive
strength).
So: get yourself a signal source of known power, connect it to your
USRP, state very clearly what you use as a reference (makes a
difference whether you incorporate antenna efficiency or not, for
example), and run a quick calibration, then you'll have a factor between
digital power and physical power. Be aware that for high digital powers,
your physical power estimate is less exact.
Best regards,
Marcus
[1] compare your daughterboard's data from
http://files.ettus.com/performance_data/
On 08.12.2015 04:38, Marcus D. Leech wrote:
On 12/07/2015 10:25 PM, w xd wrote:
Thanks.
What is the deviation between the result calculate by the
formula and the result measured by the calibration source for the
USRP N210? For example,when I ues the formula:10*log10(var(x))+30 to
calculate the power of the receiver data is -20dbm.What is the true
range for the true result?
Thanks.
I can't tell you that, because there's the whole bit about:
frequency/bandwidth/gain/sample-rate
The numbers you get out of the end of a Gnu Radio are (largely)
linearly-proportional to the power as seen at the antenna inputs.
The purpose of using an external calibration source is to determine
what the proportionality constants are for each of your
configurations of settings of frequency/bandwidth/gain/sample-rate.
The FFTs in Gnu Radio necessarily can only show dB relative to
full-scale. Gnu Radio has no way of knowing what those actually
correspond to in terms of power as seen at the antenna terminals.
2015-12-08 10:53 GMT+08:00 Marcus D. Leech <mleech@ripnet.com
mailto:mleech@ripnet.com>:
On 12/07/2015 09:34 PM, w xd wrote:
Hi,
I want to measure the power.I'm now transmit the OFDM signal.
I use the usrp to receive data,and I save it to a file.I
read all the data.Then:
I use the formula to calculate the power:
10*log10(sum(abs(data).^2)/0.001) dbm
Is it the right way to calculate the power under the ofdm?
Thanks.
Best Regards,
z sw
Instantaneous signal power is proportional to:
(I**2)+(Q**2)
You can average that to whatever interval you want, and then
scale (perhaps converting into dB, as above). But to determine
*absolute*
power at the antenna terminals you'll need a known calibration
source or two, and use that to come up with calibration constants for
your particular setup of frequency/gain/bandwidth/sample-rate.
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