On 08/01/2017 06:33 AM, Rick Miller - N1RM wrote:
I currently live in a townhouse and have made an offer on a few acres in a
more rural area. I would like to measure the relative noise levels between
the two locations to reduce the probability of surprises or disappointments
should I close the deal. I have gotten access to a very good battery
powered spectrum analyzer and plan to use a tripod-mounted 6 foot whip and a
20 dB LNA to measure the noise levels at each location.
While setting this up, I though it would be interesting to try to also use
the K3 to measure noise with the same antenna (but without the LNA). I've
written a Python script to control the K3 as it steps through each band and
records S meter levels.
Might I suggest this:
http://nk7z.net/sdr-rfi-survey-p1/
blog entry. It is a way of using a cheap SDR to get an overview of your
RFI environment, and a way of being able to compare two environments.
We are going to move soon, and I wanted a way to do exactly what you
described here. I wanted a way to characterize the RFI on an entire ham
band at once, and this fills the bill well.
My first run through very late last night showed almost no variation across
any of the bands. I did see differences between bands. Right now I pause
for 1 second after setting band, mode, and bandwidth, and then another
second after each frequency change (stepping in 10 KHz increments) for
things to settle.
I don't know the dynamics of the S-meter processing, so maybe I should be
waiting longer.
I believe you need to be looking at a wider bandwidth than the K3 will
provide, hence the the use of an SDR in the above suggested read. It
takes a few days to create the spectrograms, but they will show you
EXACTLY what is happening on the entire band.
Thanks, and 73's,
Dave (NK7Z)
http://www.nk7z.net
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