Pluto SDR mod gives 56mhz I/Q ?!?!

[Tim Bucknall]

Wondering if I misunderstood what was meant by 20 MHz "bandwidth" before mod and 56mhz after.
seems too good to be true at that price, £100 approx

pity analog TV on band 3 &UHF is gone!

56mhz could grab 48-104mhz , great for studying props

Out of the box coverage is 325mhz -microwave, a mod expands coverage to the stuff we care about
Cons:
Sound like its frontend would struggle in urban locations without external filters
But it would probably be fine for people in skegness called John Faulkner who want to record the whole FM band

[daveB]

[Moderators - could we have a separate Sub-Group for SDR]

Wondering if I misunderstood what was meant by 20 MHz "bandwidth" before mod and 56mhz after. seems too good to be true at that price, £100 approx

The LimeSDR mini is £100 and appears to offer the same facilities - SDR Console v3 supports it. It will comfortably span the entire FM band as it has a 66 MHz sample rate = 33 MHz b/w. No front end filtering - so that would be needed. [But SDR console only records 2 gB file length so you would get ,30 seconds per file!]

The PlutoSDR can tune from 325 to 3800 MHz. It has an ADC which can sample at up to 61.44 MSPS with a resolution of 12-bits. There is no TCXO used, so the frequency accuracy is only 25 PPM. Although the maximum sample rate is 61.44 MSPS, the front end AD9363 only has a maximum signal bandwidth of 20 MHz, so that limits the available bandwidth. Source: rtl-sdr.com

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/adalm-pluto-sdr ... l-testing/

If you want to study propagation - then Airspy one or Airspy Mini with SDR# has a separate program - Spectrum Spy - that shows the whole spectrum - with choices of 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 MHz band width - and 1 GHz. So 50 MHz would give 65 - 105 MHz, or 100 MHz will give 35 - 135 MHz. The wider the bandwidth chosen - the slower the refresh rate.
But buy one quickly as they are definitely discontinued - Moonraker had 'plenty' of Airspy minis in stock as of 12th March

[daveB]

Here is an example of Spectrum spy running in 20 MHz bandwidth. Unfortunately what it is showing is some of the after dusk interference affecting the range of 60 - 120+ MHz.