@vk5qi I tend to agree with your assessment of the station gear itself contributing to the noise floor. Of course once you move the RTLSDR from the environment that’s suspect, such as to a laptop, etc… you automatically change the conditions you want to test against.
So what about leaving the RTLSDR, along with it’s PoE and other suspect noise sources in place, but use the rtl_tcp utility to “remote in” with GQRX (or SDR#, etc…) and assess the noise conditions that way ?
I’ve started to do that, along with using the rtl_power utility, to keep the conditions of the ground-station gear intact, but use different methods of looking at the RF environment/spectrum the RTLSDR is seeing. @0xCoto’s CygnusRFI utility (unveiled in this post) would also serve this remote-troubleshooting for RF noise quite well.
Do we think that doing things this way would be an advisable form of troubleshooting ground stations ?
Advisable in the sense that we recommend it to new folks trying to set up their ground-stations ?
Also, now that openwebrx has a new lease on life, I’ve wondered if ALL my ground stations should have some form of web-server accessibility to remote in and troubleshoot the listening conditions when I see issues with observations.
obviously the satnogs-client would be temporarily disabled while such troubleshooting was underway… but if these kinds of troubleshooting methods are useful, maybe they could be better documented as such and added to the troubleshooting portion of the wiki ?
(not asking for anyone else to take this on… I’ll be glad to help document these kinds of tools in the wiki as applied to these issues, just looking for others to confirm that they’re recognized and useful troubleshooting paths)