Spectral analysis of bi-tone waveforms: study of the uncertainty contributions arising from the virtual time-domain approach

Multi-tone signals are discrete-spectrum sig¬nals with spectral components located at non-harmoni¬cally re¬lated frequencies. The authors proposed a method that combines the use of a virtual time domain and a statistical technique to perform the spectral analysis of multi-tone signals in short observation intervals. In this paper, the algorithm implementing the above method is treated as an error source whose effect is referred to as “intrinsic” contribution to uncertainty. A theoretical study on this contribution is developed in the case of bi-tone signals and application examples are provided. The experi¬mental results confirm theory.