Bandscope GUI Design

[cprobertson1]

My latest project is more software than hardware based - a welcome change from puttering away in the lab all day!

It's a simple bandscope - originally running on a Raspberry Pi (with an optional touchscreen) and using a USB RTL-SDR dongle as the detector - simple enough: but I was unhappy with the software availability so I said "F***" it and made my own.

(note, that bottom button is just a placeholder to allow me to access the debugger script on-the-fly!)

So far it works decently well - it's still running on dummy data rather than actual spectral data but that side of things should be fairly simple to implement with the RTL-SDR Wrapper: though this might affect the framerate depending on the sweep distance!

It's written in Python(2. and uses WxPython (a wrapper for the WxToolkit) for the GUI - and will hopefully be extensible to almost any SDR provided it has a python wrapper.

The question is: what sort of features should I implement in it?

So far it has:
-USB RTL-SDR Support
-Spectrum display (frequency sweep)
   -Max/Min signal strength indicators
   -Frequency indicators (highlights top 5 peaks)
-Waterfall display (frequency sweep / time)
-Hybrid (combined) Spectrum/Waterfall display (one above the other)
-Custom spectrum/waterfall palettes
-Zoomable Displays
-Optional Hardware controls (i.e an optocoupler for a dial and keypad digit entry)
-Multi-Platform (tested on windows and linux)

What other things would people like to see?

Some things I've already considered are:
-Grid overlay on the displays
-Distance between peaks/peak measurements
-Adjustable Noise Filters (might be hard on performance!)
-Audio-receive
   -this would required adjustable bandwidth controls as well
-Audio Recording
-Trigger level control (don't display any signals weaker than a setpoint)
-Data logging (log the spectral data over time)

-

[danadak]

Capture and compare plots.

Simple statistics, dbm, avg, sigma, .....

Look at a manual for a modern analyzer from Agilent, Tek, Yokogawa.....


Regards, Dana.

[LaserSteve]

Have a way to subtract a baseline, which is easily made by terminating the input with a 50 Ohm load. I have more then one device that cannot subtract the baseline and spurs, and that is annoying. Some times you DO want to turn the baseline subtraction off, but it is very good thing to have.

Steve