As we promised last week, here’s a real technical content. Sagax Communications organized a little “contest” recently. We made a side by side comparison with an industry standard spectrum analyser with excellent results.
We deifined our high dynamic range receiver with data sheets and test reults that you can download from our resources site. However we tought customers like to see direct comparison with some industry standard test equipments. So we compared our high grade spectrum analyser SRM-3000 monitoring and collecting receiver and SRS-3000 search and intercept receiver with one of the market leading supplier. Furthermore the outcome was truly impressive.
Regading RF inputs and receiver technology the real challenge is not handling the low level signals with enough sensitivity or handling high level signals with input attention. The real challenge is to do both of them simultaneously. Thus one of the ultimate figure of merit of the receiver is the instatenious dynamic range. Especially with frequency agile, wide bandwidth receivers. We already presented narrow band 3rd degree intermodulation test results, but one of our customer likes to chellenge us with real signals.
Spectrum analyser comparison
The two receivers have to monitor LW-MW-SW radio stations with very strong local signals. They like to see the level of 3rd degree intermodulation components generated by the non linearity of the system.
The two strong local signals are 540KHz and 873KHz with more than 100dBuV/m signal strength at the receiver post
so they are generating pretty strong signal in the antennas. The two intermodulation components are 2×540-873=207KHz and 2×873-540=1206KHz so we collected the leves from both systems.
As you can see from the results, the receiver’s dynamic range is equal or better than one of the best spectrum analyser on the market.
Sagax Communications – Always on Target
Follow us on your favourite social media
