Non-Serial Scanners of the Future

[Val1101]

Scanners have been scanning one frequency at a time back to the days when crystals were used. PRI is nice but limited. In the new era of SDR’s, full-band parallel scanning should be possible. In other words, entire bands can be watched by the scanner for activity. Scanning one frequency at a time in serial fashion should be obsolete. Spectrum analyzers have a rating called Real Time Band Width RTBW which indicates the amount of the spectrum that can be displayed at one time. My Aaronia Spectran v6 has an RTBW of 44mhz so that’s the width of spectrogram on screen. I can see all activity across 44Mhz at one time, also capture/record all the IQ data across any 44Mhz segment. How often does a serial scanner miss activity because its busy scanning individual freq’s one by one? Where are the next generation scanners that look at whole bands simultaneously? They wouldn’t change the need for freq lists from RadioReference because of the need to display the originating police, fire, etc. system. Full band parallel scanners would also improve SEARCH which is also limited to one freq at a time. Curious if anyone is aware of any full band parallel scanners on the market?

 

[Ubbe]

The CPU power needed would make a scanner very expensive and use a lot of battery power. If using your own computer at home you can setup several SDR receivers in their own frequency ranges and monitor a whole frequency band instantly if needed, for conventional analog frequencies.

Perhaps someone one day will make a program that uses several SDR dongles, as much as the computer can handle, or perhaps several RaspberryPie mini computers with their own SDR receiver, and the program will allow single monitoring of one active system or several placed in different positions in a stereo sound image, and all receivers activity show on the screen and can be individually selected and toggled by the number keys and listen to all by the 0 key but then only one at a time are heard, like a scanner, and it would also handle digital and trunked systems but would then, more or less, be only one digital system tied to one SDR.

/Ubbe

 

[IC-R20]

In addition to what Ubbe said that would also make "scanning" pointless, though many SDR softwares have or have the ability to add that as a plugin which is occasionally useful. Since 2013 I had the transmit capable Blade RF that can just record a whole 30 MHz at once. Then you got rackmount integrated units Per Vices makes like the Crimson TNG that can take in over 300 MHz of spectrum at once.

So it goes with the modern day fad mentality there's really no need for any crossover in that regard, two different types of use cases best left to their own. It works far better leaving my SDR as a monitoring station base that I can just remote database into from any computer whenever I need to check anything. I mainly log the 33cm ISM band to keep track of ham radio activity and repeaters as they come and go.