On 01/15/2015 12:55 PM, Anderson, Douglas J. wrote:
I don't think it's tuning effects, if I'm understanding that correctly. You mean that after you retune the USRP, the LO will take some time to settle?

In the script I posted, that shouldn't be a factor, as the UHD instance is created and tuned when I import the file in the python interpreter, and the acquisitions are then run later and without retuning the USRP.

I might be misunderstanding the issue, like if there is something that needs to settle each and every time an acquisition is requested independent of actual frequency tuning.

... but that's the reason for my question: so that I can better understand the underlying process. Thank you for the details!

-Doug

In that case, you're probably just looking at DSP artifacts. The DSP chain doesn't, as far as I know, run, doing its thing, between finite_acquistion() calls. So, it will be in whatever state it was last in, then you bring it up again, grab some samples, and stop it again. So it doesn't really have much of a chance to achieve steady-state operation with the CIC decimators and half-band filters. At least, that's *my* understanding of what
  finite_acquisition() does.

It may be better for you to set-up a streamer to stream continuously, and then just discard the stuff you don't want from the stream. Both the hardware, and Gnu Radio are really optimized for the steady-state streaming case.




------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* Nick Foster [[email protected]]
*Sent:* Thursday, January 15, 2015 10:49 AM
*To:* Anderson, Douglas J.
*Cc:* GNURadio Discussion List
*Subject:* Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] voltage pulse from UHD driver

Nothing. The timing might be a little different -- if it's tuning effects you're seeing, there's effectively a race condition between tuning and sample collection. Gnuradio will never discard samples off the front unless you use a Skip Head block, which you should probably be doing as evidently you aren't expecting your samples to be tightly synchronized to any particular point in time.

--n

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:46 AM, Anderson, Douglas J. <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    Okay, this makes sense.

    What about the version I posted on StackExchange where I
    /am/ using GNU Radio's scheduler to request the samples?

    What does GNU Radio do when running a constant flowgraph (like
    uhd_fft) that it doesn't to when running topblock.run() for each
    collection, as far as discarding samples off the front?

    -Doug
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    *From:* Nick Foster [[email protected]
    <mailto:[email protected]>]
    *Sent:* Thursday, January 15, 2015 10:40 AM
    *To:* Anderson, Douglas J.
    *Cc:* GNURadio Discussion List
    *Subject:* Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] voltage pulse from UHD driver

    In general you cannot use the first few samples of output from an
    acquisition. There are a couple of reasons:

    First, if you begin collecting data immediately (rather than using
    UHD to schedule a collection at a given time) and you are using a
    daughterboard with a downconverter (anything but BasicRX or LFRX),
    tuning takes some time and things will be ugly while PLLs settle, etc.

    Second, there are digital halfband and CIC filters in the USRP,
    and they are not reset between acquisitions. This means that the
    first samples will have some junk left over from the last acquisition.

    Unfortunately, the general answer to what you're trying to do is,
    don't do that.

    Best,
    Nick

    On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 9:26 AM, Anderson, Douglas J.
    <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

        Hi all,

        I've been slowly working to understand/isolate an issue with a
        strange voltage pulse at all freqs and on USRP N210 with 50
        Ohm load.

        I posted about it on StackExchange here, and there are more
        details at this link:
        
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27968237/semi-consistent-voltage-pulse-from-usrp-when-using-simple-gnu-radio-flowgraph

        Since then, I've further isolated it as a UHD issue by
        completely removing the GNU Radio scheduler from the equation
        and simply using the finite_acquisition function on UHD to
        pull samples directly into Python.

        Here is the code I'm using to produce this output
        http://i.imgur.com/c3YWA22.png:

        An interesting thing is that when using the UHD driver is used
        outside a flowgraph (uhd.finite_acquisition), I get the
        strange pulse consistently, whereas when used in a flowgraph
        it was inconsistent (see the StackExchange question).

            import numpy as np
            import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

            FREQ = 800e6
            RATE = 1e6
            NSAMPS = 100
            usrp = uhd.usrp_source(device_addr="",
            stream_args=uhd.stream_args('fc32'))
            usrp.set_center_freq(FREQ)
            usrp.set_samp_rate(RATE)

            fig, (freqplot, timeplot) = plt.subplots(2, sharex=True)
            freqplot.set_title("Frequency domain")
            timeplot.set_title("Time domain")

            def plot():
                data = np.array(usrp.finite_acquisition(NSAMPS))
                shifted_fft = np.fft.fftshift(np.fft.fft(data))
                dBm = 20*np.log10(np.abs(shifted_fft)) - 30
            freqplot.plot(dBm)
            timeplot.plot(np.abs(data))

            def run_tb(times=25):
                for _ in range(times):
                    plot()
            plt.show(block=False)


        *Douglas Anderson**| Intern*
        DOC/NTIA/ITS-T | 325 Broadway St., Boulder, CO 80305 | P: 303
        497 3582 <tel:303%20497%203582>

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