what is the PSD unit by using FFT method

Question

I'm just doing a power spectral density analysis of a signal in time domain. I'm following the fft method described in :

http://www.mathworks.com/support/tech-notes/1700/1702.html

It gives the real physical unit for the PSD. However, the unit is "power", is that mean "V^2/Hz"?

If I take 10*log10(power) or 10*log10(V^2/Hz), do I get the unit of "dB/Hz"?

Then how can I convert it to dBm/MHz?

Answer 1

If you have a PSD in W/Hz i.e. 100 W/Hz then you have 50 dBm/Hz. dB/Hz or is often vaguely and generically used instead of dBm/Hz. Audacity uses dB as shorthand for dBFS (not dBFS/Hz, because it is computing a DFT, and discrete frequencies use a power spectrum and not a density) . A digital signal that reaches 50% of the maximum level has an amplitude of −6 dBFS, which is 6 dB below full scale – the removal of the MSB, hence the 6dB/bit figure (because 50% of maximum level is 25% of maximum power; 1/4 = - 6dB)

dBm is the logarithmic ratio of the power with respect to 1mW, you divide the power by 1mW to get a unitless ratio, and then take the logarithm to get dB units, which in this case makes more sense to be clarified as dBm.

dBc/Hz is the ratio with respect to the carrier power, which is a ratio of two dBm/Hz values, meaning you subtract them and you get dBc/Hz; you get the same result if you divide the two linear power levels in W and then convert the ratio to dB (or more appropriately dBc).

dB-Hz is a logarithmic measure of bandwidth with respect to 1Hz and

dBJ is a measure of spectral density as a logarithmic ratio to 1 joule, seeing as W/Hz is indeed J.

Power spectral density is a density function, so you need to integrate it to get the actual quantity, like a line Integral of a V/m electric field, or a probability density of probability per x. This does not make sense for discrete quantities and instead the power spectrum is used akin to a probability mass function. If you see dB (which should be used for the discrete frequency domain) instead of dBm/Hz then it's wrong, but if you see it instead of dBm then it's right, as long as it's made clear what the reference is.

Answer 2

It depends on the unit of your timeseries. Often we think of this as just "amplitude", but if your timeseries is a series of voltage amplitude vs. time, then your PSD estimate will be Volts^2/Hz. This is because the PSD is the Fourier Transform of the autocorrelation of your original signal: The autocorrelation has units of Volts^2, and running it through the Fourier Transform decomposes these units over frequency, instead of time, resulting in units of Volts^2/Hz. This is commonly referred to as Watts/Hz, but the conversion from Volts^2 to Watts is not very physically meaningful, as W = V^2/R.

10*log10(power) will result in a unit of dB/Hz, but remember that decibels are always a comparison between two power levels; you are quantifying a ratio of powers. A better definition of decibels is 10*log10(P1/P0), as explained here. If you simply plug a PSD bin estimate into this equation, you are setting your PSD bin to P1 and implicitly comparing it to a P0 value of 1. This may be what you want, and it may not be. For visualization purposes, this is fairly typical, but if you have a standard reference power you should be comparing to, you should use that for P0 instead.

Assuming that you are attempting to plot a dB Power Spectral Density estimate, to convert from Hz to MHz, you simple rescale the x-axis of your frequency graph. Remember that a MHz is just 1 million Hz, so the only difference is that 240000Hz = 0.24MHz

EDIT The point brought up by mtrw is a very valid one; if you are dealing with large amounts of data and are averaging FFT vectors, I highly suggest the Multitaper method; it's a much more statistically sound method of sacrificing frequency resolution for greater confidence on your PSD estimate.