[Discuss-gnuradio] Can SDR be used for very short pulse detection?

[David Goodenough]

First of all, I am a newbie to this list, and while I managed to find
some references to SDR (and GNU Radio) being used for detecting 
astronomical radio pulses, I could not find the kind of thing I need.
I apologise if my searches missed a previous discussion.

I need to detect pulses that are single digit number of cycles long
in the UHF band.  All I need to know is that a pulse has been detected
and its amplitude - I do not need high resolution on that amplitude.  I 
am not expecting more than a few of these per second.  It would be 
useful to be able to exclude any signal longer than such a short pulse.

I notice that many SDRs (in particular ones like the RTL2832U based
ones) use an IF which is probably too low, i.e. the pulse would be less
than one cycle, so I guess that this class of receiver is not going to
be much use which is a shame given that they are so easy to get hold of
and so cheap.

David