Visualizing the Electromagnetic Spectrum in the Time Domain (ePoster)

Since the advent of the Software Defined Radio (SDR), the ability to collect raw signal information from the electromagnetic spectrum has become ubiquitous.  Typically, the received Inphase and Quadrature (IQ) data is processed with a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm to display the signal information in the frequency domain.  While this has many advantages, to include displaying a waterfall to show the energy per frequency over time, the waterfall visual representation does not visually represent the entire signal.  This work demonstrates a novel method to view the electromagnetic spectrum in the time domain by directly plotting the IQ data in 3‐ dimensional space.  The Visualization Tool Kit (VTK) is utilized to provide this representation and Paraview is utilized in viewing the 3D data.  The goal is twofold; first to visualize the electromagnetic spectrum for educational use and second to determine if weak signals near strong signals can be visualized where they have traditionally been obscured by the computation of the signal’s FFT.