Hi Jim
I do not know what the effective RF/IF bandwidth is. There is no real
specifications in the manual. When I get some time I will try and measure the
bandwidth. When I do listen to the audio it seems to be very "restricted"
unlike the TV meters. The signal level meter in the RE331 also seems to be
Quasi Peak in nature and may well be calibrated for a 120khz EMI bandwidth.
Getting information from Radar Engineers is difficult as many aspects of their
designs seems to be kept very close to their chest.
Your comment on received power being proportional to the RX bandwidth is
something that I never actually considered when writing the review, and makes
perfectly good sense. I own a Sadelco FS3 meter as well a very professional
Unaohm TV field strength meters with IF and video outputs which in the past
has allowed me to observe the multiple source breakdown on the scope.
The RE331 is a new acquisition and I will be doing a more thorough evaluation
of its capabilities while trying to find something that is more cost
effective with roughly the same capabilities for ham use.
One thing that I did not mention, is the excellent backlight display on the
RE331. I also will mention the large front firing speaker and high audio
output which is also very good. Much like the TV field strength meters that
have high output and a decent speaker size. The ham and hobby grade handheld
scanner receivers mostly have very poor audio amplifiers that are rather
anaemic. I always struggle with the low level, distorted and general poor
audio quality from these handhelds.
I had a chance to test the RE331 indoors and found that its response to switch
mode and other RFI pulse noise was very interesting and the resolution was
superb. Battery charger pulse noise readily showed up. I found a pulsing noise
in my shack roughly around 331mhz whose sources I was not sure about. Strangely
it was coming from my K3/P3 and the pulsing was very obvious on the RE331. The
same goes for the many wallwart chargers. Even using a largish H field probe
on the handheld AM scanners with nano volt sensitivity the pulsing and pulse
fidelity of these sources was not as clear as on the RE331.
I do have a Pulse/radar generator feature on my signal generator and I will
be making some timed pulse width measurements in the future. I just want to be
sure that I fully understand what I am measuring because I certainly do not
want to damage the front end on the RE331.
73Craig
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