Can SDR be used for very short pulse detection?

First of all, I am a newbie to this list, and while I managed to find
some references to SDR (and GNU Radio) being used for detecting
astronomical radio pulses, I could not find the kind of thing I need.
I apologise if my searches missed a previous discussion.

I need to detect pulses that are single digit number of cycles long
in the UHF band. All I need to know is that a pulse has been detected
and its amplitude - I do not need high resolution on that amplitude. I
am not expecting more than a few of these per second. It would be
useful to be able to exclude any signal longer than such a short pulse.

I notice that many SDRs (in particular ones like the RTL2832U based
ones) use an IF which is probably too low, i.e. the pulse would be less
than one cycle, so I guess that this class of receiver is not going to
be much use which is a shame given that they are so easy to get hold of
and so cheap.

David

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 04:25:13PM +0100, David Goodenough wrote:

I need to detect pulses that are single digit number of cycles long in
the UHF band.

I think SDR would only be useful for this application at very high
sample rates (about 500 Msps or higher).

Mike