A Simple Calibration Generator and Method for PC Soundcards

Standard PC soundcards can be powerful measurement and logging tools in certain cases; nevertheless, they need calibration to perform these tasks. Bandwidth information is also important when using soundcards as acquisition hardware of a software defined radio chain or in ultrasonic measurements. We are proposing a simple hardware tool using a classic CMOS circuit as a harmonic generator and an associated method to calibrate the voltage measurement and to assess the usable bandwidth. This quickly enables full characterization of the soundcard usability.