Wish List Item? S/N of current station

Comments

• Christoph

  June 2020

  I was wondering if it is possible to display somewhere the signal to noise of the selected station. It would be nice to be able to compare antennas etc to see if they are improving it.
  

  
  S/N depends a lot on the kind of signal you are interested in, i.e., I don't think there is a generic solution.
  
  You might have a look at the S/N data produced by the WSPR community, see
  http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/spots
  http://wsprdaemon.org/graphs/index.html
• n6gn

  June 2020

  I think that there is likely not a generic solution, certainly unless you can provide a generic definition of 'noise'. If it's large enough, signal is probably easier but deciding whether noise is an average, peak, what averaging period, power average, voltage average ... rapidly makes it unclear.
  The WSPR reporting has two different algorithms which provide two different estimates. This turns out to be interesting because the spread in those two values often gives insight into, say, thunderstorm influence.
  It's a jungle out there...
• benson

  June 2020

  For antenna work on HF indeed it would be really helpful to have a measure of SNR in a narrow band receiving channel, whereas on VHF and higher frequencies RSSI alone might be sufficient to check for improvements.
  
  Without knowing any specifics of the desired signal how about an approximation of SNR in the time domain by dividing mean value of the demodulated audio signal by the standard deviation of the signal measured within a certain time window.