Jim, You wrote, "...is it a limitation of current components that prevents having a panadapter that can display the entire band at once?"
The short answer to your question is "Yes". The amount of spectrum that can be monitored at one time is determined by the maximum bandwidth of the A/D convertor which is in turn dependent on the sampling rate used. The maximum bandwidth is always going to be less than the sampling rate. Therefore, the frequency range displayed by the panadapter is determined by the capabilities of the A/D convertor used. You will notice that the FLEX-5000 family of transceivers is capable of using a sampling rate of 192 kHz while the FLEX-3000 is only capable of a maximum sampling rate of 96 kHz. This difference is due to the different A/D chips used in the 2 types of radios. Theoretically, if you had an A/D capable of a sampling rate of 40 MHz or so, a communications link with the bandwidth neseccary to handle the resulting data stream, and the CPU power required to process that 40 MHz bandwidth digital stream in real time, it would be possible to display the entire HF spectrum at one time. Of course, you would also need a monitor a couple of hundred feet wide to make the display useable....hi..hi. Seriously, an A/D with these capabilities would be prohibitively expensive, the required communications link does not exist with the current technologies available in the PC environment, and the processing power is also beyond the capabilities of PC-type computers. But, theoretically, it is possible. 73, Ray, K9DUR _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flex-radio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
