High Level Software for 4.8 Ghz LHC Schottky System

A high level software package has been developed for a 4.8GHz Schottky system installed in the LHC at CERN. It has two main components. The first is a monitor application continuously running on a dedicated server as a daemon process to acquire the FFT traces, perform data analysis, publish results and do archiving. The second is a graphical user interface to display the FFT traces and various measurement results. It also allows the end user to change the settings for the front-end electronics such as the local oscillators, bunch selector, amplifier gains etc. Data analysis with curve fitting poses a big challenge due to the strong coherent signals that are often observed superimposed onto the Schottky sidebands. A method has been successfully created to remove the coherent spikes to enable curve fitting on the underlying signals, with the ultimate aim of providing reliable tune, momentum spread, chromaticity and emittance measurements for LHC beams with no external excitation.