- generate a 1 GHz tone
- measure amplitude at +/- 10 kHz, +/- 100 kHz, +/- 1 MHz, ...
- generate a 2 GHz tone
- measure amplitude at +/- 10 kHz, +/- 100 kHz, +/- 1 MHz, ...
- want to overlay those offset amplitude curves
You could just plot vs absolute frequency to see one, but to overlay you need to center around a tone, and it just makes sense to show 'offset from tone' as the x axis. However, those steps imply a log scale.
Below is a working example of exactly this situation in plotly.js. I've included the ideal here with both positive and negative on a log scale, and the normal linear plot so that the difference in parsing it quickly is obvious:
See the Pen symlog approximation by Robert Hamner (@rhamner) on CodePen.
The basic algorithm is pretty simple:
- Determine the max and min values and the value closest to zero; largest of max and abs(min) is upper bound...value closest to zero is lower
- Split all traces into positive and negative (x values here since I just did this for x in the demo)
- Create two x-axes: one for positive and one for negative
- give both the same bounds
- reverse the negative x-axis
- assign ticks with positive values but negative labels to the negative x-axis
- put a small buffer between them to represent that zero is undefined
- Plot positive traces vs positive x-axis and negative traces vs negative x-axis, but make the negative x values positive
In that demo above you can just step through the javascript code and it should all be pretty clear.
If you want a slight variant of this that matches 'symlog' in matplotlib, just add a third, linear axis to connect these two instead of leaving a gap. I personally prefer the gap for this situation.
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