R820T vs. E4000

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Benedikt Heinz zn000h at gmail.com
Fri Mar 15 00:01:33 UTC 2013


Hi everyone,

although there are some comparisons between the R820T and the E4000
already [1, 2], I also did some tests with another use-case in mind.
I'm working on a thing similar to RTLSDR-Scanner [3]. I want to
monitor a large part of the spectrum continuously.
So I compared the R820T with the E4000 using RTLSDR-Scanner w/ and w/o
an antenna.
My results are here:
https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0ByDAKwyEiyx_XzZ5ZnpRV1VZWDQ/edit?usp=sharing
There's much more spurs with the E4000 than w/ the R820T. According to
[1, 2] one also would expect a better overall sensivity compared to
the E4000.
However, the GSM900 signals for example seem to be way better with the
E4000 according to the RTLSDR-Scanner. Tuning to a certain channel w/
OsmoSDR Source in GNUradio gives about the same SNR - contrary to the
RTLSDR-Scanner output. Can anyone explain this?
Also, the DVB-T channel at 502MHz is quite weak in the R820T
RTLSDR-Scanner output when compared to the E4000. I had a closer look
at the lower limit of the channel in gnuradio. This can be seen in the
502MHz_*.png pictures. The E4000 produces a nice +20dB step while one
can hardly see the channel in the R820T spectrum. I don't understand
this as well. Is this AGC-related? Manually setting a fixed gain
didn't really help though...

Any explanations?

Thank you!

Best regards,

Hunz

[1] http://steve-m.de/projects/rtl-sdr/tuner_comparison/
[2] http://www.hamradioscience.com/rtl2832u-r820t-vs-rtl2832u-e4000/#more-1852
[3] https://github.com/EarToEarOak/RTLSDR-Scanner




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