Single Tone

A single-tone measurement requires a stimulus signal, which is always a single-tone sine wave that excites the device under test (DUT) at a specific frequency. A single-tone measurement characterizes the magnitude and phase of one specific frequency of the DUT.

Because a single-tone measurement uses a pure-tone stimulus signal, you can choose an arbitrary test frequency and duration. Thus you can have the optimal dynamic range and most accurate result of harmonic distortion. However, a single-tone measurement requires much test time to cover multiple frequencies because the result is single-point.