Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Record the entire RF spectrum.

[Charles Swiger]

On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 09:24 +0100, mat holton wrote:
> Hi there everyone,
> 
> I sent Eric and email asking if it was possible to record the entire 
> spectrum and about the possibilities that would result if this was 
> possible. After an excellent reply, I continued and he suggested I post 
> here for more information. I would be very interested in the answers. 
> 

That is what got me excited - in short, you can record an 8Mhz wide
band with the USB bus (minimum decimation of 64Mhz sample rate is 8).
That's one TV channel or 1/3 of the FM band. However it eats up disk
space pretty quick at that rate, about 50Gb every 15 minutes.
I use smaller pre-demodulation recording for practical ham and shortwave
listening - setup a good listening post to capture 640KHz (decim = 100)
of an 'event' (contests, sunspots, etc) then go dx'ing over and over
again ;). 6900 - 7500 KHz is one of my favorite bands, where you can get
pirates, hams, international broadcasters, utilities, spy numbers, a
time station, etc., and only uses about 20Gb/hour.

--Chuck