R820T vs. E4000

This is merely a historical archive of years 2008-2021, before the migration to mailman3.

A maintained and still updated list archive can be found at https://lists.osmocom.org/hyperkitty/list/osmocom-sdr@lists.osmocom.org/.

Benedikt Heinz zn000h at gmail.com
Sat Mar 16 19:55:12 UTC 2013


2013/3/15 Sylvain AZARIAN <sylvain.azarian at gmail.com>:
> 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 did two new measurements with the gain set to 20 in RTLSDR-Scanner.
The files with the -gain20 in the filename [1] show the new results.
There are more spikes from the R820T LOs now, but it's still less than
with the E4000 I'd say.
The good thing is that the DVB-T stations as well as some other
signals can be found as expected now.

2013/3/16 Al <al at eartoearoak.com>:
> I think you've run into a couple of issues, firstly it appears that the AGC
> isn't fully disabled on the R820T (if you remove the aerial the noise floor
> increases).

It looks like gain=0 just was too little for the R820T. gain=20 seems
to be a good start.
Maybe exposing the gain-value in the regular UI would make sense?

> Secondly RTLSDR-Scanner averages 2 chunks of bandwidth either side of the DC
> point, these seem relatively quiet with an E4000 and FC0012 but I haven't
> had chance to check the R820T yet.  This tuner may have a very different
> noise floor.  I was wondering about adding a feature to allow the user to
> pick their own segments (by terminating the aerial and looking at the noise
> distribution).

Ah, that's interesting. I was indeed wondering how you avoid the DC
spike and my pathon skills are close to zero ;-)
According to [2], the R820T doesn't use a Zero-IF, so there should be
no DC-spike at all.

> Has anyone had a chance to test 2 different dongles with the same tuner?
> I'd be interested to know if it makes a difference to the noise floor, if
> there is little change, I could vary the scan based on the tuner.

I do have two E4000 and two R820T dongles, but I haven't yet compared
the noise floor.
I'm thinking about a per-dongle baseline file w/o an antenna for
compensation. This approach should be more robust. Otherwise you need
to shift the baseline spectrum according to the frequency error.

Best regards,

Hunz

[1] https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0ByDAKwyEiyx_XzZ5ZnpRV1VZWDQ/edit?usp=sharing
[2] http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/osmocom-sdr/2012-September/000253.html




More information about the osmocom-sdr mailing list