R820T

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Leif Asbrink leif at sm5bsz.com
Mon Mar 18 01:29:25 UTC 2013


Hi All,

When measuring the NF of dongles using this chip
with traditional methods one gets very discouraging
results. I need to turn up the noise source for
NF to 17 dB before I see the desired 3dB increase in
received noise power.

Fortunately this is an artifact The NF is low, but there
is some kind of noise controlled AGC somewhere.

If I send one or two carriers into the dongle everything
seems normal, but if I send a single carrier plus white
noise into it, the intelligent "something" applies automastic
gain control to keep the noise floor at a nearly unchanged
level. The signal which is at a fixed level seems to decrease
while the noise seems unchanged. This is not what we normally 
want in SDR.

When looking at the code I just get confused. It is
not obvious to me what gain control is involved.
Presumably the RTL2832 chip has some clever algorithm
for evaluating the noise floor and the output from that 
seems to be used for the R820T. I think that for SDR it 
would be better to disable all those things and allow 
the user to control gain manually.

One of the good usages of RTL-SDR is to monitor the wideband
noise floor of microwave systems. Measuring performance
by measuring sun noise for example. That is not possible with
the current implementation of the R820T.

Is there anyone who could give a hint how to disable this
feature?

Regards

Leif / SM5BSZ





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