Receiver sensitivity/noise floor

GNU Radio
1

Hi All

Does anybody have information on what the receiver sensitivity or noise
floor is for the XCVR2450 boards with a USRP2. I need to know at what
level a spurious signal from another source could cause noticeable
interference to a desired signal.

Regards

Ian.

2

On 02/15/2010 10:11 PM, Ian H. wrote:

Hi All

Does anybody have information on what the receiver sensitivity or noise
floor is for the XCVR2450 boards with a USRP2. I need to know at what
level a spurious signal from another source could cause noticeable
interference to a desired signal.

There is no absolute receiver sensitivity measurement. You need to
specify your modulation, coding, data rate, and how good your software
implementation is.

Noise floor is also something that requires additional information to
compute an answer. You need to specify a bandwidth.

It is for the above reasons that sensitivity and noise floor are not
useful in describing a software radio, since you can do so many
different things at different bandwidths. Noise figure is the only
absolute measurement which characterizes a receiver independent of those
other factors. At high gain, the XCVR has a noise figure of 5 to 10 dB
depending on your frequency.

Your second question about spurious signals interfering with a desired
signal has nothing to do with the first question, though. Interference
from spurious is a completely different phenomenon from noise, noise
figure, sensitivity, etc.

Matt