[Discuss-gnuradio] Correct method for "compressing" a power spectrum

[Marcus D. Leech]

Let's say I have an FFT output that's many, many, bins wide, and I want
to compress that information into a narrower
  display (let's say from 4M bins down to 1024 bins).

My approach has been to sum up each set of [4M/1024] bins, and use that
as the final output.  But should I be averaging
  across the bins?  That is, should I be taking each 3906bin group from
the 4M bin wide spectrum and computing an average
  across those bins, and stuffing it into the appropriate place in the
1024-wide spectrum, or something else?

Seems to me that if I have 4000 1Hz-wide bins, I should sum them to give
me the total power in a single bin that
  "represents" the same amount of bandwidth.  But is it more subtle than
that?

-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator, Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org