Re:Fun with Software-Defined Radios: Mapping the Spectrum in...
by throwacnt on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @09:27PM
(#10195689)
In theory, everything you write is correct.
In practice, none of it matter in this case. The leakage of rectangular window is ~30dB at a distance of 30 bins, and they aggregate more than 30 adjacent bins together ("re-bin"), making the leakage no more than 1 bin. To make things worse, the dynamic range of their receiver barely scrapes 40dB (peak) or 30dB (SFDR/SINR) - rendering the use of a more sophisticated window a moot point.
Re:Fun with Software-Defined Radios: Mapping the Spectrum in...
by npen on Wednesday September 09, 2015 @07:48PM
(#10195388)
Thank you for this! We'll do some more research and look into modifying spectrum_sense.
edit: After inspecting the code, spectrum_sense is indeed applying a blackman-harris window before the DFT.
In addition even the modified periodogram discussed above has asymptotically nonzero variance [2], which means no matter how many samples you take, you will still have 'noise' in your PSD estimate. If you use biased estimators of the periodogram, such as the welch-bartlett method or the blackman-tukey algorithm, you will get much better results.
[1] http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4844/en/
[2] http://www.mathworks.com/help/signal/ug/nonparametric-method...