At my former employer we were using the HackRF in sweep mode to do I think
100 MHz to 6 GHz sweeps at 1 Hz (i.e. almost 6 GHz scanned each second).
For contiguous sweeps I think it used a non-configurable 7.5 MHz (RF tuned)
step or something like that, but gave you much better frequency resolution
as the waterfall was the output of a some FFT which was somewhat
configurable (so you could sort of set the resolution BW).  We did make use
of QSpectrumAnalyzer mentioned in a previous post and in combination with
the hackrf sweep-mode worked quite well.  I think the HackRF uses the same
driver as rtl-sdrs but a typical rtl does not support the sweep-mode of
operation.

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 8:00 PM, Balthasar Indermuehle <[email protected]>
wrote:

> Thanks Marcus, indeed I'm using B200's for this project. X300's are
> slightly over my budget unfortunately... but I'm also interested in doing
> the same with RTL dongles.
> You mention 450ms for tuning a B200 - that seems rather longish?
>
> Cheers
>
> - Balt
>
> On 29 March 2018 at 06:04, Müller, Marcus (CEL) <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> so, 60 steps in 3 Minutes… sounds absolutely doable with the Ettus B200
>> (you asked about UHD drivers, so I presume you mean USRPs – the RTL
>> dongle has nothing to do with UHD) and the usrp_spectrum_sense.py
>> script that comes with GNU Radio. Even if I do not endorse the
>> architecture of that script, and would recommend you reserve up to
>> 450ms for tuning, as the B200 can take a bit of time to tune over some
>> larger steps.
>> With the other USRPs, you'd be faster. With a X300+TwinRX, you'd be
>> able to do 80 MHz on each channel at once, and can tune the channels
>> independently, so that you can actually even interleave tuning and
>> receiving operation; realistically, that'd imply an effective
>> observable bandwidth of always at least 120 MHz; 3000 / 120, meaning
>> you only need 24 steps to cover all that bandwidth. With tuning delays
>> in single milliseconds (too lazy to look this up right now, so let's
>> say 1ms), that'd be 25ms tuning, roughly 2.999583 minutes of spectrum
>> observation for 3 minutes of operation.
>>
>> Stitching that together to a full spectrum is more of a challenge here,
>> but assuming you control the frequency hopping with commands to the
>> USRP Source block, and hence are in control of when which band appears
>> on the sample streams:
>> You could do something like have a fixed 13-frequency sequence that
>> each of the two receive channels hop along in fixed time intervals.
>> Convert to vectors of interval length, FFT+magnitude-square these, and
>> reassemble to a full spectrum vector (if your frequency sequence is
>> strictly ascending, and non-overlapping, then just leave them in the
>> order they are – all frequency bins should now be equidistantly
>> spaced).
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Marcus
>>
>> On Wed, 2018-03-28 at 12:19 +1100, Balthasar Indermuehle wrote:
>> > At my work we're using R&S EB500s for continuous spectrum monitoring at
>> our sites of interest. These machines step through the frequencies 70 -
>> 3000 MHz in about 3 minutes in chunks of 50 MHz (from memory), and then
>> assemble the fragments into a contiguous waterfall display.
>> >
>> > Is anyone aware of a wide band scanner software (that may or may not be
>> GNUradio based) that works with RTL-SDR dongles and with UHD drivers and
>> would allow to create a wide band spectrum sweep?
>> >
>> > I've built a raw IQ recorder that does just that, but it needs to be
>> wrapped into a decent GUI, showing some nice waterfall displays and needs
>> to be made pretty. Before I'm investing the time to build this I thought
>> I'd check if that's not effort already done and shared by someone else.
>> Google thinks no... anyone know differently?
>> >
>> > - Balt
>> > _______________________________________________
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