[RFI] RE 331 Short review

[Charlie Delta]

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