Q

A

The hardware (e.g. the Handyscope HS3) samples the input signal(s) and stores the measured data in memory inside the hardware.

That data is then transferred to the computer, in a waveform buffer.

When inside the computer, the (time domain) data is processed and displayed in a graph in the oscilloscope, displayed as one or more numbers in the voltmeter and converted to frequency domain data that is displayed in the spectrum analyzer.

When copying a waveform to a reference channel, the time domain data from the waveform buffer is transferred to an identical buffer for the reference channel. When references are displayed, the (time domain) data in the REF buffer is processed and displayed in a graph in the oscilloscope and converted to frequency domain data that is displayed in the spectrum analyzer.

When saving a waveform to disk, the time domain data from the waveform buffer is written to disk.

When reading a waveform from disk, the time domain data is read and stored in the waveform buffer. To display the data that is read, the (time domain) data is processed and displayed in a graph in the oscilloscope, displayed as one or more numbers in the voltmeter and converted to frequency domain data that is displayed in the spectrum analyzer.

So, in other words, the software always uses the time domain data that came from the instrument and all other "features" are calculated from it.

When switching on averaging in the spectrum analyzer, the frequency domain data, which resides in its own buffer, is averaged and displayed. There's no averaging of the time domain data.

Therefore, when copying the data to a REF channel or writing it to disk, no averaged data is stored.

However, when saving a waveform from within the spectrum analyzer, an extra file is written, that contains an ASCII representation of the frequency spectrum as seen on the display. It's a Comma Separated Values file which can easily be read into other applications like e.g. Excel. The file is named <filename>.FFT where <filename> is the name you picked for that saved waveform. This file will contain the averaged waveform.