if you were wishing to use an rtlsdr to scan and identify signals across its full tunable range, how long do you think it might take?
It looks like the instantaneous bandwidth is about 2.4MHz, tunable range say 50-1750MHz so you would have to look at the whole spectrum in about 700 chunks i've seen a wide range of times as to how long the stick takes to retune, ranging from about 500 times a second (2ms) to 20 times a second (50ms) so it would take from 1.4s - 35s just to retune the 700 times I have no idea how long you would need to sample at each freq to be able to have enough data to decide if there were a signal present within that 'chunk' of spectrum I assume you would probably capture x s of IQ samples, run them through an fft and then just look for peaks, i.e energy in a bin or bins exceeding some suitable threshold. If I could get a feel for what x s would roughly be then I could get a handle on my original question I guess the whole thing could be speeded up with some a priori knowledge of where signals are likely to be, e.g. you may be able to skip parts of that spectrum that you know won't have anything of interest in them but i would still be very interested to know how long it would take to look at the 'whole-thing' as it were. apologies for the vagueness of the question, but i'm only really after a vague answer for now.. i.e. ballpark in seconds say, or are we talking minutes, hours or even days! I did see some of the rtl_power plots that seem to stretch to 24 hrs so maybe it takes longer than i thought!
