Jim Bay from the Met is subbing for me on the Million Second Quiz and introduced me to this RF Spectrum analyzer The PC USB Tuner and BNC cable are available on Amazon or eBay for less than $50 (BNC cable costs more than tuner!). RF range is 25MHz-1700MHz for software defined radio (SDR). RTL2832U Dongle BNC adapter cable Software Defined Radio - SDR# Software is free Also, thankfully, Zadig has an automatic driver download and install program The program seems to be written for Hams and lacks some obvious SA controls like Span but does have a nice responsive display with waterfall and several kinds of demod through your laptop speaker just by clicking on a carrier. This alone is terrific. It is only for looking and listening to one carrier at a time. " the TV dongles have a typical maximum usable sampling frequency of 2.4 MHz, allowing a display approaching +/- 1.2 MHz." When it was all choppy yesterday I was pushing the sampling rate to 2.8 or 3.2mhz and I guess it's the dongle that can't do it, not the PC. Specs so, no substitute for a real SA for doing a site survey, but an awesome toss-it-in-the-bag tool. There are a few different versions with variations in chipsets, I think the E4000 chipset goes higher into UHF with lower sensitivity but I'm not that up on the details.
