Frequency resolution issue using FFT in numpy

Question

I use Tektronix oscilloscope to perform some signal acquisition. I get 10.000 measurement points (few signal periods) and I have to do a frequency analysis on that set of data. My signal is 8MHz sine wave. When I use either SciPy or NumPy I get the same result - frequencies are spreaded too wide. The distance between two values is 500kHz and the highest frequency is 2.5GHz (absurd). When I want to measure frequency bandwidth around 8MHz I can only get exact values of 7.5, 8.0 and 8.5 MHz. I tried to change sample spacing determined by (x[1]-x[0]) and I got nothing better.

def CalculateFFT(t_val,p_val):
    x = t_val #Two parameters: [x,y] values
    y = lambda x: p_val
    com_signal = y(x) # Combined signal
    FFT_val = abs(scipy.fft(com_signal))
    freq_val = scipy.fftpack.fftfreq(len(com_signal), x[1]-x[0])
    spec_val = 20*scipy.log10(FFT_val)
    return freq_val, spec_val

Answer 1

It is worth reading in more depth how DFFTs work but you should always have the following formulae in mind. For a time series with n points and maximum time Tmax, the time resolution is given by dt = Tmax / n

A DFFT will produce n points with

Fmax = 1 / dt

dF = 1 / Tmax

You seem to suggest the maximum frequency is sufficient (so the time resolution is okay) but the frequency resolution isn't good enough: you need to collect more data, at the same time resolution.