Hello Andy,
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Wow, great in depth reply, that helps clear that up no end, many
thanks for the considerable time that must have taken you, much
appreciated Andy.
Best regards,
Chris 2E0ILY mailto:[email protected]
> No 41dB is NOT a real S/N figure and is due solely to your
> artificially restricting the noise bandwidth gon gin ! If you use
> a receiver bandwidth any narrower than the full SSB bandwidth then the S/N
> reporting will be wrong.
> With just one exception (*) there is no benefit at all to be gained
> from using a narrow receiver filter. It does absolutely nothing to
> improve signal reception and just makes your noise measurement
> wrong. The reasons are as follows :
> All filtering of the signal is done in the DSP software, where for
> WSPR it is bandpass filtered to a bank of 1.46Hz wide filters,
> called bins (as in dustbin) - this being the tone spacing and the
> speed of a WSPR signal. There may be some incidental
> pre-filtering on the way to getting down to this narrow bandwidth,
> but it is not relevant to the process. ONLY the final 1.46Hz
> bandwidth is the one that matters.
> Measuring the signal level (the S part of the S/N) is
> straightforward. Your four tones fall in four of the 1.46Hz wide
> adjacent parallel filter banks corresponding to each of the four
> tones transmitted. The sum of the power in the tones is then the
> signal in the four adjacent bins added together and is just a relative
> number.
> But to get S/N we now have to make a noise measurement and here is
> where it gets difficult. There are many ways of estimating the
> noise and one of the simplest is to take everything going into the
> soundcard / software and assume that as it is so wide, a few weak
> signals present won't affect the average too much; ie. that it is all
> noise.
> An assumption has to be made about the input now, and since SSB
> radios are used, the assumption is made that the noise is bandpass
> filtered at this point to 2.5kHz width - this being the bandwidth of
> a typical SSB filter. By measuring the signal over this full
> bandwidth a value for N in 2.5kHz can be obtained.
> As the WSJT standard for S/N is to express it in a 2.5kHz
> bandwidth, simply dividing the previously measured S value by this N
> (for 2.5kH input) will give the final S/N value. If DSP
> prefiltering has been included in the software, the noise will have
> been measured over just this pre-filtered bandwidth and the lower
> resulting N is then scaled up to what it would be in 2.5kHz. Noise
> power is proportional to bandwidth, so a 250Hz prefilter means the
> measured total noise is now 10dB lower and this correction has ot be added on
> Simples ! Except it is all too easy to go very wrong.
> First of all, if the input noise is externally filtered (say by a
> narrow CW filter) its total power will be lower by the proportion of
> this BW to 2.5kHz. So the value of N will be less. S stays the
> same (it is filtered in software to 4 * 1.46Hz) so same S, lower N
> results in a higher S/N when the input is bandpass filtered.
> This is clearly why a certain F station consistently reports
> ridiculously high values of S/N for everyone.
> Next is what happen when strong signals come up inside the SSB
> filter width but outside the WSPR band. These can get lumped into
> the overall measurement and give an artificially high value of N.
> They are some way away from the signal of interest so don't actually
> affect the decoding process, but to lead to a falsely low value for
> S/N. This is probably happening for stations who consistently
> report lower than expected S/N for many stations.
> There are many ways that more accurate estimates of noise can be
> obtained, using statistics and probability distributions to separate
> out genuine noise from signals. Others just by looking for the
> presence of signals and adding everything else up that doesn't fit
> that criteria of 'signal'. All are used in the electronic Warfare
> and Communications Intercept business to automatically detect and then
> classify signals.
> But it is a complicated process just to obtain an incidental
> measurement value for information only, that does nothing to help the actual
> decoding process.
> (*) The one exception, where a narrow input filter will help is if
> a very strong local signal appears in the SSB filter passband that
> is sufficient to depress the AGC. This can degrade the wanted
> signal. However, if the receiver is properly designed, the S/N of
> the wanted signal in the now depressed audio should still be the
> same. A soundcard has typically 80dB dynamic range or more, so
> unless the unwanted signal is say 60 to 70dB above the WSPR signal
> of interest, it should still cope. Although the N measurement will
> be wrong for the reasons detailed above
> For a description of how signals can be detected in noise, take a
> look at the RadCom Data columns for April and June 2008. There's
> also a description on page 47 my book "Command, Computers,
> Microcontrollers and DSP for the Radio Amateur". RSGB still have a
> few copies - I saw it on the stand at the Convention! (Although
> several sections in there are embarrassingly out of date by now).
> Andy G4JNT
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