Smart SDR panadapter vertical dB scale

John G3WGV

I'm perplexed by the vertical dB scale on Smart SDR. Right now I'm tuned to a quiet part of 6m and the slice flag shows a signal level of S1 or -118dBm, which is about what I would expect. The radio API is also sending -118 to my controller. But the panadapter is showing the noise floor at around -132 (dBm, I assume). This 14 dB difference seems to be consistent on any band and any signal level.

What is the vertical scale showing? If, as I would assume, it's dBm, why is it different to the slice flag display? I'm running the latest V2 software. Apols if this is old news - I did search a bit but didn't find the answer.

Thanks and 73.

David Chen

Same here. Panadapter shows -115 but slice flag display show -100/-99dbm 73 de BA4RF

VK7WH Winston

Just a guess. Perhaps one reading is the noise floor level for the panadaptor width displayed, and the other lower level is for the noise floor of the received bandwidth displayed in the slice. This makes sense because you would expect the noise floor to be lower after the additional filtering. 73 Winston VK7WH

John G3WGV

Not sure I can see this, Winston. The slice flag is showing a higher reading than the panadapter and the flag is showing the signal strength inside the filter passband, i.e. after the additional filtering that you mention. I'm sure there is a simple explanation but it eludes me right now!

73, John, G3WGV

Dave Pease

Has to do with the bandwidth.  Change to narrow cw and they should be about the same

John G3WGV

Thanks Dave. I habitually use 600Hz bandwidth as I am 100% CW operator and that was where I took the original readings. I wound the bandwidth right down to 50Hz and the slice flag now shows -127dBm vs. around -132dBm on the panadapter; still some 5dB higher. So your comment that it's about bandwidth appears to be correct.

It raises the question, what exactly is the panadapter dB scale actually showing?

VK7WH Winston

John, Steve addressed this in a talk he gave at Dayton a few years ago, I and I thin it had something to do with the slice meter reading a different point in the Signal chain to the vertical dbm scale in the panadaptor. I think if you open up the panadaptor to display a large segment of the spectrum, you will see the noise floor in the panadaptor increase significantly. 73 Winston

VK7WH Winston

I've just searched the community and found a post by Steve which provides the answers Best 73 Winston VK7WH On the Alpha list, there was a great discussion that I thought would be a valuable read for the entire group. I asked permission and wanted to put the flow here. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did. I removed the senders' email address to protect their Inboxes from spam. On Jan 9, 2015, at 11:44 AM, XXXXX wrote: I did some testing on v1.3.8 on my 6500 to try to determine why the dBm noise level in a Slice receiver is often greater than the dBm noise level of the Panadapter supporting that Slice receiver. On 10meters using Xvtr with no antenna connected and RF gain=0 the Pan’s noise floor was a nominal -116dBm at about 620 kHz wide. Zooming was kept constant in the following tests. Now I thought that any Slice Rx created in that Pan, at it’s widest BW, would have a noise floor < -116dBm because the Slice’s bw is always < the Pan’s bw. But that’s not what I found. SliceRx BW Rx dBm meter 175Hz -121.5 350Hz -120 700Hz -116.5 1400Hz -113 2800Hz -110 5600Hz -107 11200Hz -104 As I halve the Slice Rx BW from 11200Hz, the dBm meter decreases 3dB. Fine business. But how can it’s dBm level (-107, -104 ) be larger than the Pan’s noise floor of -116dBm?? Now, as I further halve the Slice BW below 700 Hz, the dBm meter drops approx. in 3dB steps below -116dBm which is expected. So is the dBm level in the Slice passband the power level of the noise there only? If I now reduce the Pan’s BW by zooming In (+), the Pan’s noise floor drops as expected. So is the graphically displayed dBm level of the Panadapter , the power level of the noise of the Pan’s “passband” only? However, the Slice’s noise floor dBm remained the same when I zoomed the Pan (good thing too ;-}. Does that mean there is no connection between the Slice’s passband dBm power level and the surrounding Panadapter’s “passband" dBm power level ? How does one measure the noise floor dBm level of a quiet band? Without including bandwidth, that question seems meaningless, yet we hams seem to have an intuitive idea of what a “quiet band” is. Please clarify this Steve and TNX. On Jan 10, 2015, at 7:35 AM, Graham Haddock wrote: As you have figured out, when you are measuring noise, knowing the bandwidth is a necessary part of the measurement. A signal has a specific level, as long as the measurement bandwidth is wide enough to enclose the entire signal, and all the modulation sidebands. Noise has an energy level per unit bandwidth, and if you double the measurement bandwidth, then you double the energy inside the measurement bandwidth and the measured level goes up 3 dB. The panadaptor is the graphical plot of the signal strength in an extremely large number of very narrow receivers. Each receiver is called a "bin" from the mathematics of the process used to generate them. So, think of the panadaptor display as the graphical plot of the levels in each of several thousand receivers (or bins) side by side on different equally spaced frequencies. The measurement (bin) bandwidth is on the order of 1.5 Hz to 10 Hz, depending on the zoom level of the panadaptor. As you zoom in and out, the bin bandwidth goes up and down, but it is not directly connected to the slice receiver bandwidth, since the panadaptor is an entirely different receiver structure in the software, and makes its own decisions as where to change the bin or measurement bandwidth. If you assume a measurement bandwidth down in the range of single digit Hertz, then the levels you are being presented will make sense. Depending on the zoom level, you are dealing with 2000 to 4000 receivers (bins) and individual bin bandwidths of 1.5 to 10 Hz. It is hard to fool Mother Nature. No laws of physics were broken, mutilated, or killed in the operation of the Panadaptor. :-) --- Graham / KE9H On Jan 11, 2015, at 9:01 AM, Stephen Hicks, N5AC wrote: ​Just seeing this. I see Graham has made a good response that tells you most everything here. I can't resist this topic and will add a few more details below:​ ​As Graham mentions, the panadapter is actually a collection of receivers that slice up the band. We use it to measure the energy in a sliver of the band and then display that. We are currently using a fixed number of bins (or slivers) of the band at 4096. Incidentally, all of the bins are not usable -- please see the side not at the end "Why can't I use all the bins?" We typically use about 60% of the bins, but this changes at certain zoom levels. So when you zoom to a width on ​the screen that is 100kHz wide, you can figure that our bin WIDTH is roughly 100kHz / 0.6 / 4096 =~ 40Hz. This is not exact as we employ a complicated algorithm underneath to give you the feel of continuous zooming. There are a million ways to build a panadapter. I could give a 3-hour talk on all of the methods that could be used and what the trade-offs of each method are! But this number will get you close to the actual bin width. I can also say that the exact bin widths are all a multiple of a power of two times 5.8594Hz -- in other words 5.85Hz, 11.72Hz, 23.44Hz, 46.88Hz, etc. So the 40Hz we just found is actually either 23.44 or 46.88Hz exactly. Anyway, let me use a cooking analogy to try to help you understand noise measurement. Lets say that all the noise you can see in the bandwidth of your ADC can be represented by a 1/4c (cup) of water. This would be the equivalent of taking the bits directly out of the ADC, converting them to ONE BIN and taking a wideband noise measurement. Let's say that we will be using a 1c measure for a bin. When you take the 1/4c of water and pour it into the 1c measure, it fills it about 1/4 of the cup and we have a high noise level. Let's say our signal is a Hershey's Kiss and it is setting in the cup currently, but the water line is ABOVE the top of the kiss. There is a signal there, but you can't see it (pretend that water is opaque or use milk if you're trying this experiment at home ;-) ). If we run a 10-point FFT to look at the spectrum, we take that same 1/4c of water and divide it across ten 1c measures. Now, each cup has 1/40c of water and we have "lowered the noise floor" Now the Hershey's Kiss sticks above the water line. The more bins we use like this, the further out the kiss sticks and the more we can tell the true nature of the Hershey's kiss (he has bad keying sidebands, it seems). If you imagine 4096 of these cups, when you zoom in and out using the bottom of the spectrum (zoom slow), we are just hiding and showing you more or less of the bins, but the bins are the same size, hence the noise floor stays the same. But occasionally, you hit the edge of the bins we show you and we switch from bins of one size to bins or twice or half that size and the noise floor jumps by 3dB. * * * * * If you are measuring noise, it behaves as I have described above. If you are measuring a monotonic single tone signal, however, it behaves differently. Let's talk about how and then discuss why. Let's say that you stick a signal generator into your radio and set it for -40dBm. You will see a sharp spike in the panadapter with the noise many dB below on the sides. If we zoom way out where the bins are several kHz wide (remember from above if we zoom to, say 7MHz, our bin size might be 3kHz. We take a measurement in the radio by looking at the panadapter and see that the signal is at -40dBm. As we zoom in, though, it stays there. One click and our bin size is now 1.5kHz, but the signal is the same ... why? Imagine that Hershey's Kiss again and as we change the water level in the 1c measure in minuscule amounts, we can still see and measure the top of the Hershey's Kiss and can tell exactly how tall it is. If your signal fits entirely in the bin and it rises our of the noise 10dB or more, as you adjust the noise around it by changing the bins size, the signal is still the dominant energy. Back to the kitchen -- imaging that we are changing microliters of water in the cup and we are measuring the WEIGHT of the volume in that 1c measure. The Hershey's Kiss will always dominate because it weighs so much more. In the case of the radio with noise, a -40dBm signal "weighs" 80dB or 100,000,000x more than the noise typically does. This is like adding a gnat to the weight of a car and expecting a change in the scale measuring the car! The point of all of this last paragraph is to show than when you are measuring a signal, the readings in the bins (and the receiver) show the same number as you adjust the bin width. But when you are measuring the noise, it is billions of little signals all on various frequencies and as you split the bin, half of those signals go to one bin and half go to the other and so the level goes down by 3dB (half)! Now, as I further halve the Slice BW below 700 Hz, the dBm meter drops approx. in 3dB steps below -116dBm which is expected. So is the dBm level in the Slice passband the power level of the noise there only? Yes -- the slice receiver is a separate receiver from the 4096 receivers in the panadapter. It's level is completely independent, BUT they have the same source material that they derive their ​data from. If I now reduce the Pan’s BW by zooming In (+), the Pan’s noise floor drops as expected. So is the graphically displayed dBm level of the Panadapter , the power level of the noise of the Pan’s “passband” only? Well, the passband of the bin --​ However, the Slice’s noise floor dBm remained the same when I zoomed the Pan (good thing too ;-}. Does that mean there is no connection between the Slice’s passband dBm power level and the surrounding Panadapter’s “passband" dBm power level ? YES!​ How does one measure the noise floor dBm level of a quiet band? Without including bandwidth, that question seems meaningless, yet we hams seem to have an intuitive idea of what a “quiet band” is. Hams always use the term noise floor, but what they mean is "noise floor in a 500Hz bandwidth." If you want to report "the noise floor" to a ham, set your slice receiver to a 500Hz filter and then take the measurement. This is what we do in the lab and it's what the ARRL does.​ Hope this helps. ​73, Steve​ On Jan 11, 2015, at 10:41 AM, Stephen Hicks, N5AC wrote: oh forgot the sidetone...Why can't I use all the bins? In a sampled system, energy that appears above the sampling frequency aliases into the first Nyqvist zone. For example, if you sample at 100MHz, a signal at 75MHz will appear at 25MHz (mirrored about half the sampling frequency) just like it was generated at 25MHz. You can read a lot about this on the Internet so I won't go into it in detail here. In the panadapter, we can zoom in to a frequency range by halving the sampling rate and filtering out anything that would alias into the band. This process is typically called "decimation" although it has nothing to do with the pure definition of decimation (dividing by ten). When we do this, we must filter out everything that we do not want to alias into our sampling area. Let's use our example from above: we are sampling at 100MHz and our first Nyqvist zone is 0-50MHz. Signals at 55MHz will show up at 45MHz. Signals at 51MHz will show up at 49MHz. This is aliasing. To prevent this, we "pick" which zone we want to look at - let's say Zone 1 which would be 0-50MHz. The way we pick is to filter before we sample, eliminating any signals from 50-100MHz so that we are sure that what we see is actually in the 0-50MHz region. We do this with a real hardware filter which is called an anti-aliasing filter. Because filters have transition bands, we will still see aliasing in the transition band. For example, a signal at 51MHz won't be cut to zero, our filter might reduce it by 10dB there, 20dB at 53MHz, 30dB at 70MHz, etc. So a signal that is -40dBm at 53MHz will still show up as a signal of -40dBm - 20dBm = -60dBm at it's mirror frequency of 47MHz. For this reason, we don't have access to all the Nyquist zone. A radio designer would generally claim something like 0-40MHz instead of 0-50MHz and he would ensure that signals from 50-60MHz might alias, but ones from 60+ MHz would be down sufficiently at 40MHz and below as to not be visible. OK so in DSP, we do all the same things, but they are not physical hardware filters, they are math. The cost of a DSP filter is 1) processing effort, 2) latency, 3) power & heat which comes from (1). To avoid trying to do something Herculean that costs lost of latency, power and money we build modest filters in DSP that have acceptable roll-off. Often times these filters make for large transition bands, or areas where we can't count on no interference from outside the filter. In this case, we just discard anything in that range. And this is what happens in the panadapter -- we filter, but discard anything in the transition band. For the panadapter, we use a couple different kinds of filters -- one of which discards 40% of the collected data and the other discards 18% of the collected data. So we are clear, we never show you any data from the transition bands -- the software in the radio always hides this so you only see what really exists on the bands. You might wonder why the pandapter in the radio is so good knowing what I've just told you -- we use a 4096 point FFT whereas PowerSDR did an 8192 point filter and we even throw away up to 40% of the data (although when you zoom way in we use much more of the data). How it possible that the panadapter is so much better than PowerSDR? The thing about PowerSDR is that it does only one FFT at the sampling rate you have selected. So let's say that you are at 192kHz sampling rate in PowerSDR. The bin size will always be 23.43Hz. When you zoom in, you are just spreading the bins available over more pixels, but you get no better resolution... Since we can see down to 1.46Hz bins in SmartSDR on a FLEX-6700, we have a 12dB visual advantage over PowerSDR. The panadapter literally sees 12dB further into the noise. By always adjusting the sampling rate in SmartSDR, we can keep showing you better and better data in the panadapter and also allow you to see wide bandwidths when you want to. Steve On Jan 16, 2015, at 10:35 PM, Stephen Hicks, N5AC wrote: On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 7:59 PM,wrote: Are representations in the waterfall exactly the same resolution (detail) as in the panadapter as you describe here? ​They are currently derived from the same FFT, but they have a lot of time integration which reduces noise variance and reveals more in the noise floor. This only gets you so far, though. To see further, you do have to reduce the bin size. We can already see 25dB into the noise floor which is around where JT65 can hear. The time averaging probably gets you another few dB. Generally you can see anything you can work on JT65. If you could see further into the noise floor, I'm not sure how you'd work those folks -- I guess you could do long averaging, etc. using a special mode. ​Steve​ Photo of K6OZY K6OZY, Elmer 524 Posts 195 Reply Likes Posted 3 years ago 0 ALL 5 REPLIES 3 years ago Photo of W5XZ - dan W5XZ - dan 562 Posts 83 Reply Likes thanks for sharing...73, w5xz, dan Like Comment 3 years ago Photo of Joe WD5Y Joe WD5Y 175 Posts 24 Reply Likes Great information, wish more articles of this nature were available. Thanks for the information. Joe WD5Y Like Comment 1 person likes this 3 years ago Photo of EA4GLI - 8P9EH - Salvador EA4GLI - 8P9EH - Salvador 1730 Posts 530 Reply Likes Phew... had to re-read several sections to grasp it. So much information! Thanks for sharing. Like Comment 3 years ago Photo of Tom Warren Tom Warren 54 Posts 13 Reply Likes This excellent explanation is way above my brain level, but this seems to describe why I can sometimes 'see' the (really weak) cw signal in the waterfall but can't 'hear' it ...on a rather quiet VHF band. Like Comment 3 years ago Photo of Mark Erbaugh Mark Erbaugh 376 Posts 34 Reply Likes With the increased sampling rate of the 6500 and 6700 over the 6300, does that imply better performance for the higher end radios? Like Comment Upload Image Related Conversations Photo of John-K3MA Is a more structured Alpha/Beta program needed? 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Bill-N6RV

Hi John

We had a discussion about S meter measurement a few weeks ago. Part of the discussion addressed the difference between the S meter reading and the noise floor in the panadapter. What I found was the Resolution Bandwidth (RBW) of the panadapter is very narrow, on the order of a few Hz. Think of RBW as the bandwidth of each bin in the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Furthermore, the resolution bandwidth changes with the span of the panadapter. This is a byproduct of the FFT (RBW = Span/(# of FFT points). As you span in closer the RBW decreases and noise level in the panadapter drops proportionately. That is a good thing.

So, not only does the noise reading on the S meter vary with IF bandwidth the panadapter noise floor varies with the span. The difference in the reading on the vertical is basically the difference in IF bandwidth and RBW in dB.
I checked this with the 6600M, my Flex 5000a, and my K3S / P3 combo. All of them do just about the same thing. These new receivers are very accurate pieces of equipment!
Bill

John G3WGV

Fascinating, thanks Winston and Bill. I'd sort of worked out that the problem had to do with the FFT bin size vs slice bandwidth but this explains it very thoroughly.

It does, however, raise a further question: what's the point of displaying this bin-level information? We have no way of telling the size of each bin and, short of changing the span, no way of manipulating it. I can't immediately think of any reason why we would be interested in the signal level in an arbitrarily-sized FFT bin.

To my perhaps simplistic way of thinking, it seems that we could use the ratio of bin size and slice bandwidth to scale the panadapter reading so that its display is consistent with the slice level. That would be interesting to have at least as a scaling option. Perhaps a compromise option would be to scale the panadapter to some fixed bandwidth, say 1000Hz.

I've also learned about Hershey's kisses. All jolly interesting!

73, John, G3WGV

Stan VA7NF

Think of the panadapter scale this way: It is showing the range of recognized signals.  As the panadapter range (bandwidth) is reduced more signals become apparent.

Significant note is: A carrier, at any bandwidth, will always show the exact same signal strength as that is the strength of that signal (equated rewording of signal strength).  Likewise a display of modulated SSB shows the signal strength of EACH sideband component that resides in a separate FFT bin.

The noise floor, however, is the sum of all noise signals WITHIN THAT BIN that both:
- Hides any very low level carriers within that bin as it is below the noise sum
- Does NOT prevent that carrier being tuned in by a slice and heard.

Strictly a presentation artifact

Ken - NM9P

There is a Youtube video of Steve making a presentation on this exact subject that explains it perfectly.  

https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=AwrDQyk.2iZb22IA13s0nIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByNDY3bGRuBHNlYwN...

Ken - NM9P

Listen to his whole presentation on noise, it is great.  but he gets to the point of S-meter vs panadapter noise levels about minute 15-16.

TomWA1MBA

So, it seems possible if not straightforward to have the option of making the vertical scale dBm/Hz instead of an unknown, or difficult to calculate number when the software already "knows" the value. Is there some reason we don't have a dBm/Hz option?

Stan VA7NF

Probably because that option has little value. If you want a standard reading (500Hz noise base) just turn on a CW receiver and set the bandwidth to 500Hz. When tuned to just noise it will give the standardized sum of all frequencies (noise sources) within that 500Hz, and at +/- 0.5 dBm accuracy. That is only as accurate as the antenna gain. No-one has an isotropic receive antenna.

Yes the panadapter will DISPLAY varying signal strength (noise levels) as each bin size is adjusted by changing the panadapter total width. Perhaps, at the bottom of the display or in a meter, a "Bytes or KBytes per bin indicator would be useful. BTW, set a screen width panadapter to 2.0Mhz total width and you will get a concurrent 4096 set of samples (each pixel in the panadapter width) each representing a 500Hz sample, and the scale will also be accurate in dBm/500Hz sample