Well, there can be lots of possible reasons... They are both direct conversion receivers, with local oscillator going from low vhf to high uhf band.
We can expect lost of silicium bugs here : power level of the local oscillators frequency dependant, quadrature mismatch, mixers with conversion loss not constant etc. etc.
honestly it is not easy to know; I guess this also depends on the part itself. My experience show that from one E4000 to another, the preamps can completely behave differently. On some units, when manually set to more than 17db, it works as an attenuator :-( the power level received decreases....

For me the most interesting plots were the "no antenna" ones, showing the LO leakage ;-) If I understood clearly your plots, you have at some places high power ghosts. Maybe you are close to powerful transmitters, but this is more probably a LO to RF isolation problem: the receiver receives himself...

I usually play with the E4000, but I am waiting for some 820T to try.


2013/3/15 Benedikt Heinz <zn000h@gmail.com>
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