CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonnumpyscipyfrequency-analysis
akson128
akson128

Reputation: 59

Frequency resolution issue using FFT in numpy

I use Tektronix oscilloscope to perform some signal acquisition. I get 10.000 measurement points (few signal periods) and I have to do a frequency analysis on that set of data. My signal is 8MHz sine wave. When I use either SciPy or NumPy I get the same result - frequencies are spreaded too wide. The distance between two values is 500kHz and the highest frequency is 2.5GHz (absurd). When I want to measure frequency bandwidth around 8MHz I can only get exact values of 7.5, 8.0 and 8.5 MHz. I tried to change sample spacing determined by (x[1]-x[0]) and I got nothing better.

def CalculateFFT(t_val,p_val):
    x = t_val #Two parameters: [x,y] values
    y = lambda x: p_val
    com_signal = y(x) # Combined signal
    FFT_val = abs(scipy.fft(com_signal))
    freq_val = scipy.fftpack.fftfreq(len(com_signal), x[1]-x[0])
    spec_val = 20*scipy.log10(FFT_val)
    return freq_val, spec_val

Upvotes: 3

Views: 6484

Answers (2)

user6036470
user6036470

Reputation: 1

If (1) the sampling time is too short, (2) you require higher estimation frequency accuracy, and, (3) you know that your signal is a sine wave, then you can fit the signal to a sine wave. Like in How do I fit a sine curve to my data with pylab and numpy?, with the exception that the frequency needs to be added.

Here is an example figure with a frequency of around 8 MHz:

Figure with fitted sine wave

Below is the example code:

""" Modified from https://stackoverflow.com/a/16716964/6036470 """
from numpy import sin, linspace, pi,average;
from pylab import plot, show, title, xlabel, ylabel, subplot, scatter
from scipy import fft, arange, ifft
import scipy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from scipy.optimize import leastsq

ff = 8e6;   # frequency of the signal
Fs = ff*128;  # sampling rate
Ts = 1.0/Fs; # sampling interval

t = arange(0,((1/ff)/128)*(128)*5,Ts) # time vector
A = 2.5;

ff_0 = 8.1456e6
y = A*np.sin(2*np.pi*ff_0*t+15.38654*pi/180) + np.random.randn(len(t))/5

guess_b = 0
guess_a = y.std()*2**0.5;
guess_c = 10*pi/180
guess_d = ff*0.98*2*pi

fig = plt.figure(facecolor="white")
plt.plot(t,y,'.', label='Signal Fred. %0.4f Hz'%(ff_0/1e6))
plt.xlabel('Time')
plt.ylabel('Amplitude')
plt.grid(alpha=0.5);

optimize_func = lambda x: (x[0]*np.sin(x[2]*t+x[1]) - y);
est_a,  est_c, est_d = leastsq(optimize_func, [guess_a, guess_c, guess_d])[0]
data_fit = est_a*np.sin(est_d*t+est_c) ;
plt.plot(t,data_fit,label='Fitted Est. Freq. %0.4f Hz'%(est_d/(2*pi)/1e6))
plt.legend()
plt.tight_layout();
plt.show();

fig.save("sinfit.png")

Upvotes: 0

Greg
Greg

Reputation: 12234

It is worth reading in more depth how DFFTs work but you should always have the following formulae in mind. For a time series with n points and maximum time Tmax, the time resolution is given by dt = Tmax / n

A DFFT will produce n points with

Fmax = 1 / dt

dF = 1 / Tmax

You seem to suggest the maximum frequency is sufficient (so the time resolution is okay) but the frequency resolution isn't good enough: you need to collect more data, at the same time resolution.

Upvotes: 5

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