Broken RFX1200 and more sensitivity measurements

I went to OZ7SAT today to do some measurements on the receiver boards. I wanted to see how the sensitivities compare to that of the WBX receiver that I have measured earlier using a CW signal and SSB receiver. The criteria was again to find the weakest signal that I could both hear and see on the spectrum scope and that I would be able to decode if it was a Morse code transmission. The limiting parameter is actually the spectrum scope, because I can hear tones much weaker than what is visible on the 512 channel FFT scope.

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Binaural CW Receiver with GNU Radio and USRP

Today I felt like doing an experiment that is not quite on my TODO list – a binaural CW receiver. A binaural CW receiver is a receiver that gives a spatial feeling while you are tuning. As I understand it, you have to use stereo where the signals move from one side to the other as you tune and are in the middle when you are tuned to the frequency.

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Improved AGC for the simple SSB receiver

Few days ago I wrote about how I upgraded the simple double side band receiver implemented in the GNU Radio Companion to a simple single side band receiver. This initial implementation used some default values for the AGC attack and decay rates. These values were acceptable; however, I wanted to spend some time trying to find better values that would correspond to Fast, Medium and Slow AGC – just as we are used to in commercial radios.

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Simple SSB Receiver in GNU Radio Companion

The simple SSB software defined radio receiver is now functional!

Few days ago I wrote about how to upgrade the simple double side band receiver to single side band. The modification was supposed to be very simple and involved changing the band pass filter from using real taps to use complex taps. The upgrade wasn’t quite as easy, though.

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