1) My guess is that 0 duration just means the event lasted for a single sweep, and 0 bandwidth means that only a single point in the sweep exceeded your threshold. Does that line up with what you are seeing?
2) Using the recorder in Spike means that you would only have to write code that parses those files and looks for events. Using the API gives you more flexibility to write files in a format that’s better for you, and also you can automate more of the recording process vs manually saving the files in Spike. It’s the same underlying data/samples in both approaches.
Our data rate is 160MB/s. Using the API you can choose whether to receive 16 or 32-bit complex values. The 16-bit are shorts, and 32-bit are floats.
Retrieving I/Q data via the API is by default continuous. If you set the purge flag to false, the I/Q data will be continuous. The API stores about 1/2 second worth of I/Q data internally, so you must not let this internal buffer “wrap/overflow/etc”, otherwise you will have a gap in samples. You must continually poll the API for the duration of time/samples you need. You can detect gaps by monitoring the sample loss parameter and the status flag returned from the bbGetIQ function. You can request arbitrarily large buffers sizes from the API if desired. If you plan on streaming for long periods of time, I suggest requesting buffer sizes around ~1/60th of a second. This is still a small enough buffer to quickly allocate and does not call into the API (which has a small amount of overhead) too many times per second.
Andrew