Scope Mode

In scope acquisition mode, you can use gate and fence to accurately measure the power of any specific time. An internal or external trigger initiates the power sensor measurement with respect to time. To control which portion of the time domain data is recorded, you can configure a gate and a fence for the measurement. All points that fall within the gate are measured, but points that fall within the fence are rejected. A fence must be set up within the boundaries of a gate, unless the fence is disabled by setting the fence start and end to zero, or to the same value.

The following figure shows the relationship of a fence and a gate to the desired portion of the waveform (shown in dark gray).

The following restrictions and conditions apply when configuring gate and fence settings:

• The gate start cannot be negative, and it cannot exceed the capture time.
• The gate end cannot be less than gate start and cannot exceed the capture time.
• The fence region should fall entirely inside the gate region.
• If the fence start and fence end values are the same, the fence is disabled.
• Fence is disabled if both fence start and fence end are set to zero.
• The gate start and gate end points are included in the measurement.
• The fence start and fence end points are excluded from the measurement and have priority over the gate start and gate end points if they coincide.

Measuring noisy or modulated signals can be challenging because the trigger can occur at a wrong point or edge, so this feature is particularly useful when measuring waveforms that contain very short duty cycle timing information that otherwise skews average power measurement.