R820T with 28.8 MHz TCXO

I recently looked around for tools to use as low cost spectrum scanners, being the objective frequency range 400 MHz to 1.7 GHz (incidentally, DVB-T and GPS).
Of course rtl-sdr is an attractive option so I dusted off some dongles I had bought 6 months ago in China and played again with them, coming to the conclusion that I really like it especially after its main limitation is overcome :)

The 28.8 MHz crystal is quite poor. I asked Takuji for a TCXO but he said he emptied his stock rapidly. Of course a replacement is nowhere to be found on the big distribution (Digikey, Mouser, Farnell, RS, etc..), so I went to an old time acquaintance at Golledge and, despite having to order 100 pieces, my request was fulfilled. After all, dongles look quite good with the new crystal:

Figure 1: RTL-SDR with 28.8 MHz TCXO (Golledge GTXO-92)

I measured the frequency deviation with my simple GPS software receiver and I happy to report that it is within spec, bounded to 2ppm. By the way, I tried using other GNSS software receivers and will write about my experience in another post soon.

On the frequency plan side, the R820T combined with the RTL2832U is great for GPS. Most people would use it with an active antenna, where the LNA solves the problem of losses due to the impedance mismatch (50 against 75 ohm) and the noise figure of the tuner (3.5 dB according to datasheet).
The frequency plan with an IF of 3.57 MHz solves elegantly the problem of LO feedthrough and I/Q unbalance typical of ZIF tuner. The IF is recovered automatically in the digital domain by the demodulator so it does not appear in the recorded file. 8bit I/Q recording at 2.048 Msps is more than sufficient for GPS and I also tracked Galileo E1B/C with it (despite some obvious power loss due to the narrow filter band). In my tests, I used a Dafang technology DF5225 survey antenna and the signal time plot shows that 5 bits are actually exercised. I powered the antenna with 3.3V from a Skytraq Venus8 (Ducat10 with S1216F8) through an all-by-one DC blocked passive 4-way splitter/combiner (6 dB unavoidable loss) from ETL-systems.

Figure 2, 3 and 4: Power spectrum, histogram, and time series at L1.

I posted three GPS files here:
https://app.box.com/s/wxizs3p7zu8x2jmbnzod
https://app.box.com/s/xvfabkqfkmehg5osa3ra
https://app.box.com/s/dqrel15mwj73xijflkma

Since someone asked for it, here are the tracking results of Galileo E19 plotted after the fact with Matlab:

and Galileo E20:

More to come later,
Michele