Honored Contributor
Honored ContributorAre you building a 'receiver' or 'spectrum analyzer'? A receiver implies you have some sort of signal you are expecting to receive, whereas a spectrum analyzer is used to determine the power vs frequency in the signal being received.
You can check that your ADC works by capturing a block of samples, and then transferring those samples to a PC for analysis. However, you will not get very good signal-to-noise, since you will have such a low processing rate. You can perform the operations directly on the FPGA. There are two forms of spectrum analysis commonly implemented that achieve maximum SNR; auto-correlation via lag correlation and a polyphase filterbank (basically a filter followed by an FFT). If SNR is not an issue, then you can use an NCO to demodulate your signal, a low-pass filter, and a power detector (multiplier), and sweep the NCO across the input bandwidth. What bandwidth are you trying to sample? What FPGA are you planning on using? What types of signals are you hoping to receive? How many bits are your ADCs. Cheers, Dave
