Hi All,
I'm using an RTL-SDR dongle, so somewhere around 43dB of ADC dynamic range. I find that I rarely see aircraft more than 80 nautical miles away. Being located midway between Heathrow and Luton and under several airways, I have a large number of aircraft flying nearby.
Assuming I've got a setup that has aircraft 1 nm away at -3dBFS, is 100 nm range the absolute best I can reasonably expect? (100 being 40 dB more than 1 and 80 not being much different to 100 on a log scale).
If the receiver was somewhere different and so didn't have to cope with aircraft so close, could I tweak the gain up and see further as a result? For the purpose of the question I'm ignoring that this will raise the noise floor. I'm trying to understand if it's the ADC and nearby a/c which are limiting the receiver's range rather than something at RF.
Freddie
I'm using an RTL-SDR dongle, so somewhere around 43dB of ADC dynamic range. I find that I rarely see aircraft more than 80 nautical miles away. Being located midway between Heathrow and Luton and under several airways, I have a large number of aircraft flying nearby.
Assuming I've got a setup that has aircraft 1 nm away at -3dBFS, is 100 nm range the absolute best I can reasonably expect? (100 being 40 dB more than 1 and 80 not being much different to 100 on a log scale).
If the receiver was somewhere different and so didn't have to cope with aircraft so close, could I tweak the gain up and see further as a result? For the purpose of the question I'm ignoring that this will raise the noise floor. I'm trying to understand if it's the ADC and nearby a/c which are limiting the receiver's range rather than something at RF.
Freddie
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