The PROJECT!
Well, I will admit to being in the skeptic crowd here along with zz0468. But I have for some time been toying with the idea of communicating with some of the more technically inclined folks here (been making a mental list based on post content, etc.) and coming up with a "paper-ware" concept design for a wideband, but with as solid as is practical RF design, scanning receiver. I'd start with a full bore approach - money not a factor - and then see what creative ideas we can collectively come up with to actually keep as much of the RF performance as possible while keeping the cost under $2K, preferably under $1K but I will not constrain it to the $500 mark. This kind of unit would be for those of us really wanting and needing good RF performance and I think such folk would be willing to shell out at least $1K (providing it really DOES give exceptional (among consumer scanning receivers) RF performance) for it.
I've been thinking of things like modular front and back ends to tailor the unit to each individual's needs and price points. There would be the high performance modules and the basic economy units and, possibly, various levels in between. I have been thinking of a base unit with well shielded bays for plugging in the appropriate modules for a given situation. For extreme performance you could have mono-band front end modules for specific needs. A large unit could be an option to allow multiple front end modules so as to facilitate high performance multi-band operation or, with dual back ends, perhaps in-band dual receiver operation. A mobile version with more limited options could be designed, perhaps with only one back end bay and no more than two front end bays. The workhorse standard back end could be such that one could use it interchangeably between the base and mobile; the front end would be interchangeable also. I'm thinking the back end would take care of all of the signal processing from IF to I/Q outputs. Further processing would be either fixed in the main frame or, possibly, via another interchangeable module (again for price/performance tailoring). The front ends would handle RF to IF conversion and have basic filtering in the economy versions all the way up to automatically switchable bandpass filters and, perhaps, at least for some bands where practical, some selectable (and maybe "tunable") band reject filters with low noise, high IP3, high dynamic range amps in the big guns mega high performance versions. A possible hand held unit could use the same basic back end if it could be designed in a small enough form factor that could be practically, and with reasonable mechanical robustness, mated with the hand held main frame. This way, one could conceivably have base, mobile, and hand held frames and buy only one interchangeable back end to share between them.
All of which may indeed be a pipe dream and not actually practical but in working on the design perhaps some practical real workable solutions could fall out of the effort.
That being said, I guess you may be working along similar lines. So I will add my thoughts. Well, actually, for the most part, I will simply add my support behind zz0468's recommendations - he pretty much took the words out of my mouth, so to speak. Like him, I would stick with N connectors. They are reliable and robust - much more so than BNC's. At least I would have it be a customer option choice to have either BNC or N. Forget the old Motorola connector and PL259 - not worth the extra cost! And...long wire??! Really?! At the frequencies this unit is shooting for...I honestly can't see the need unless it does HF and MF below 20MHz! Just stick to N and/or BNC (or maybe TNC, SMA, or SMB) and forget the rest.
All for now - interesting! Hope you're for real! We need new approaches!
-Mike
