Message posted by Mojo on October 24, 2020 at 3:18:51 PST:

Airspy R2 with SDR# software.
There is no free lunch. The penalty is quantization noise. The bigger the chunk of spectrum looked at any given instance the higher the noise floor so reception will never be as good as a regular scanner. Also they are more likely to have problems if there are any strong transmitters near by. I use a preamp and a FM broadcast band filter. The preamp will give you a higher signal to noise ratio at the front end of the SDR. You can start with a cheap Rtl2832 and see how you like it but it can only look at 2Mhz at a time instead of 8Mhz with the R2 so the search rate will be lower. And you will need to experiment with the settings. The software will let you push the search rate faster than the SDR can operate. I use 70 millisecond detect time for unattended searching with a 5 second delay. Faster than that and it stops too often on a freq where nothing is there. 50 milliseconds is fine with no delay and you are watching it so you can stop it when it finds an active freq. It also seems to run better searching backwards from from high to low.

In Reply to: Re: What Scanner should I get? posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on October 23, 2020 at 21:36:52 PST:

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