VK4ZXI

Improvised DVB-T test instrumentation My last post was on snooping on DVB-S signals from satellites. I found some useful software to do that, Crazyscan and Blindscan. However, the author of Crazyscan also wrote Crazyscan 2 for DVB-T but needs specific TV hardware:   http://sourceforge.net/p/crazyscan/wiki/Info/ I ordered a TBS 6220 (DVB-T) (~$100) as well a TBS 6925 (DVB-S) (~$300), both pci-e cards, direct from the manufacturerhttp://www.tbsdtv.com/ . With courier delivery, they arrived within a week. Setting up the TBS 6220 is straight forward and works well as a TV card with DreamTV; mainly to confirm that the device works. I put both cards in and software for both, but things got messy. Removing the TBS-6925 and its software, including auto start programs, fixed everything. I need to walk before I run. My interest is with Crazyscan2. Setting it up is easy, just putting all the needed files in the same directory. The result is amazing: a scan over 1 GHz at 1 ...

BladeRF on Haswell i5 running Windows 8 with SDR-Console at 935 MHz 20 MHz bandwidth Screen shot of BladeRF running on Windows 8 with i5 Haswell processor. The BladeRF windows installer uses an unsigned driver. With the extra security of Windows 8 it will not normally even give you the option of installing unsigned drivers, Windows 7 does. However Windows 8 has a special restart where the unsigned driver block can be disabled. I think I described it in earlier blogs. Using the earlier beta of SDR-console V2 per earlier blogs, the bandwidth is 20 MHz rather than 30. I think the narrower bandwidth is more appropriate re Nyquist, about half the 38.5 MHz bandwidth of the BladeRF. At 20 MHz, the CPU is barely busy at about 4 % versus 10 times that of screen shots at 30 MHz in earlier blogs. Simon Brown, the author of SDR-Console said in his Yahoo forum that the FFT runs at 30 MHz too. Dropping the bandwidth to 20 MHz seems to calm everything down.   ...