Capabilities and Performance of the LHC Schottky Monitors

The LHC Schottky system has been under commissioning since summer 2010. This non destructive observation relies on a slotted waveguide structure resonating at 4.8GHz. Four monitors, one for each plane of the two counter-rotating LHC beams, are used to measure the transverse Schottky sidebands Electronic gating allows selective bunch-by-bunch measurements, while a triple down-mixing scheme combined with heavy filtering gives an instantaneous dynamic range of over 100dB within a 20kHz bandwidth. Observations of both proton and lead ion Schottky spectra will be discussed along with a comparison of predicted and measured performance.