Resolution - the Effects of Frequency and Points
It is not always obvious how frequency range affects measured distance and resolution, and it often appears to be counter-intuitive. If you are new to making Distance to Fault measurements, this section will help clarify what is happening.
Resolution Distance (in meters) of the DTF measurement, that is, the shortest distance between two faults that can still be resolved by the analyzer, is determined by the following equation:
Resolution Distance (in meters) = Measured distance (in meters) / (1/2 * Number of Points)
NOTE: Please be careful how you interpret this equation. Note that to increase the resolution, you need to reduce the Resolution Distance; to reduce the resolution, you need to increase the Resolution Distance.
You can see from this equation that:
To increase the resolution, that is, to reduce the Resolution Distance:
- you can increase the number of points, or
- you can reduce the measured distance.
To reduce the resolution, that is, to increase the Resolution Distance:
- you can reduce the number of points, or
- you can increase the measured distance.
NOTE: Although you can set your number of points to 256, 512, or 1024, you will only ever be able to save 256 data points when you save trace data. This is because only 256 points are ever used to display the trace, regardless of how many points you have used to actually make the measurement. You will not, however, be losing any resolution, or reducing the quality of your data. The results will still reflect the true number of data points that you specified.