Electronic test instruments on a PC

Virtins Technology has launched the Virtins Sound Card Instrument, a powerful PC sound card based virtual instrument software. It consists of a real time oscilloscope, a real time spectrum analyzer and a signal generator, and can run them concurrently. It features a specially designed data acquisition approach which is able to monitor the input signal continuously without missing any trigger event before a frame of data is collected. As a result, Virtins Sound Card Instrument boasts a very fast screen refresh rate (typically 15 frame per second) and thus a truly real time response. It supports sophisticated triggering method including pre-trigger and post-trigger which are rarely found in other sound card based instruments. The sampling frequency depends on the sound card and can be up to 192,000 Hz. Hence it is ideal for tests and measurements within audio frequency range.

The software provides zooming, scrolling and cursor reader functions and allocates most of the computer screen for data display, all of which are essential for exploring the fine details of the measurement data. This is in contrast to many other sound card based instruments which spent much of the precious screen space to simply mimic the panel of the conventional instrument.

Virtins Sound Card Instrument provides a comprehensive range of functions including wave form addition, wave form subtraction, Lissajous Pattern display, transient signal recording, voltmeter, RMS amplitude spectrum display (linear and logarithmic), relative amplitude spectrum display (linear and logarithmic), phase spectrum display, auto correlation coefficient display, cross correlation coefficient display, function generation, multi-tone generation, arbitrary waveform generation, white noise generation, pink noise generation and sweep signal generation (linear and logarithmic). It allows the adjustment of FFT size and the selection of windowing functions (e.g. Triangle, Hanning, Hamming, Blackman).

Virtins Sound Card Instrument stores data in either standard WAV file or TXT file. It supports WAV file importing and BMP file exporting and printing.

The software can be downloaded from www.virtins.com for free trial.