Creating Trigger Signal by thresholding signal inputted into AWG for transmission

[DParrish]

I am currently trying to use one of the transmission channels on my 5423 AWG card to transmit RF pulses in order of 250us in length.   I am in need of creating a trigger signal that transmits a digital TTL voltage signal to unblank the power amplifer for the pulses being made.   

I don't have any additional AWG transmission channels so was hoping to use one of the digital trigger channels through the PFI port on the AWG card ?

I wondered if it would be possible to create a threshold filter that essentially transmits a positive trigger signal when the RF transmission on the AWG card is non-zero.  Could this be done before transmission by creating a trigger waveform the same length as the RF waveform that is then transmitted by the trigger line in parralel to the RF transmission or would this need to be something that is calculated / run in real time ?   If so how would I go about implementing something like this?

Or is there a way to transmit custom trigger signals anyway if I pass a signal waveform to it for transmission ?  i.e. I make the trigger signal at the same time I make the custom RF pulse waveform as well,  in a seperate MATLAB script.

I appreciate any advise at this time 🙂

[Jonah_TSE]

Hi Dan,

I'll just summarise what we spoke about over email in case anyone has a similar question in the future. 

To have a custom trigger like this you should use data marker events. If you configure these marker events to happen at the same time as your pulses, you will get the desired trigger signal.

This help page details the available configurations for this. I think that as your pulses are constant width, you can actually use either Pulse or Toggle mode and then you should be able to link the marker events to a PFI line on your card.

This page steps you through how to create a marker event.

Hope the project is going well.

Jonah Winn

Applications Engineer.

National Instruments.