6. Measures in the temporal domain

6.1 Background

In very general terms, when a property of a signal does not appear in one of its two representations (time or frequency), this property is clearly visible in the other representation. The spectrum analyzer is therefore complementary to the oscilloscope. Since the network analyzer is used to measure transfer functions as a function of frequency, there is no specific complementary device for measuring impulse responses. Time reflectometry processes are limited by the rise times of the test signals and by the frequency bandwidth of the oscilloscope. By mathematically transforming the measured data up to several tens of gigahertz, it is possible to obtain time responses that cannot be obtained by direct time analysis. This time transformation is particularly useful in two...