Understanding and selecting the hardware
As usual, the hardware capabilities and costs are linked. Here is a list of the main domains that the hardware selection impacts, with a list of the main SDR adapters and their capabilities per domain.
The hardware will mainly define the following:
- The frequencies you can access are as follows:
- RTL-SDR (receive only): 20 MHz–1.75 GHz
- HackRF: 10 MHz–6 GHz
- BladeRF: 300 MHz–3.8 GHz
- USRP: 70 MHz–6 GHz
- The width of the spectrum you can cover in one shot is as follows (the sample rate in MS/s is the number of samples it takes per second. It is also the width of the spectrum that is captured):
- RTL-SDR: 2.4 MS/s
- HackRF: 20 MS/s
- BladeRF: 40 MS/s
- USRPs: 61 MS/s
The higher the sample rate you have, the faster you can explore the spectrum, but it will (most of the time) not impact your capability to analyze signals since most of the signals have a bandwidth of a few dozens of KHz in the lower frequencies...
