The time window control: how to set it, and why a long window is decimated rather than refused. Martino Ferrari Time window

The window is how much time the plot shows. Every row shares one window: the figure has a single x link group, so the rows cannot drift apart. The trigger's event span follows it, and the pre-trigger share is a share of this window.

How to reach it

The header bar's window button opens a popover: type a number, pick a unit under it, or step a decade with the arrows.

The button's own label is a reading of the current window in a natural unit, width-locked so a change of window cannot widen the header bar.

Worth knowing

A window too long to store at the wire rate is decimated, not refused. The shared clock takes a power-of-two stride, and each group of samples is averaged rather than strided, so a tone above the stored Nyquist is attenuated instead of aliasing to a false low frequency.

The stamp stored for a group is the group's mean, which is where the averaging puts the value. Stamping at the end of a group would shift every trace half a stored sample late.

Moving the window across a decimation boundary rebuilds the buffer and drops the history. Walking it inside one decade is free.

This control is the only thing that changes the window. A zoom, a pan or a fit moves the view inside it and leaves it alone — which is the point of the previous bullet: a wheel notch that redefined the window could re-plan the buffer and throw your samples away.

The trigger sees the stored (filtered) signal, not the wire signal, because an edge found on a sample that is not in the buffer could not be cut out of it.

Example

1 MS/s with 200 MB of buffer. A 2 s window stores every sample (time x1). Widen it to 600 s and the stride becomes x16: 625 S/s stored, anti-aliased at 312.5 Hz. A 2 kHz sine seen through that window reads y=[-0.059, 0.079] — attenuated to about 6%, not folded down to a full-amplitude 125 Hz one.