I believe the PCMCIA interface is going to be the limiting factor in this case. The maximum continuous rate for a DAQCard will vary from computer to computer, but it isn't extremely fast.
Being optimistic, let's estimate 64 K samples/second. I don't know if this is high or low nowadays, but it is higher than I could ever achieve a couple of years ago. Divide that by your 16 channels, and you have 4K blocks. I think you could process this in 1 second easily. This gives you 1 Hz resolution up to 2 Khz.
Now, if you ditch the laptop and go to PXI, it is a whole different story. DAQ rates will not be the limiting factor. You just need to find out how large of a block you can process and keep up.
My approach to this problem would be to figure out what analysi
s you need, then figure out what hardware can accomplish it. Do you really need 1 Hz resolution? Do you need to process every bit of data that comes in? Are you going to store the results, or just display them on the screen? Can you do post-processing of the data if necessary?
Bruce
Bruce Ammons
Ammons Engineering