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Remote Operation
WDCA Techniques to Improve Throughput
WDCA Techniques to Improve Throughput
This section provides a series of suggestions and rules of thumb that are useful
in increasing measurement throughput.
Take control of the sweep
Put the instrument in single sweep mode using INIT:CONT:OFF, and sweep only to
acquire data. The sweep is the most time consuming operation in the WDCA.
You should send all your sweep related settings and then take the sweep, tak-
ing as few sweeps as possible.
Turn the display off
The single most effective thing you can do to increase measurement through-
put is turn the display off. If the operator is interacting with the computer dis-
play rather than the instrument display, consider turning the display off. This
does not make the internal motors or the data acquisition system operate any
faster. Instead, it removes all the WDCA system overhead associated with
maintaining a real time display. This makes software intensive operations
much faster, but sweep associated operations won't change very much. As a
result, the speed improvement you will see depends on your application. With
the display off, you can expect a typical application that is taking sweeps,
using markers and transferring traces to run about twice as fast.
To turn the display off:
sendMessage DISP OFF; *OPC?
receiveInteger
This takes about 14 seconds and does not affect the instrument state. You can
turn the display back on whenever you want to, either by sending DISP ON or
by pressing the local key on the instrument front panel. It again will take about
14 seconds. Note that you cannot turn off the display from the front panel.
The instrument behavior with the display off is identical to behavior with dis-
play on, only faster. You can develop your application with the display on for
easy debugging, then turn the display off once everything is working.
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