Investigating the Adjustable IF Bandwidth on the R820T Chip

Over on his blog, Thierry Leconte has been writing about some IF bandwidth experiments that he's performed on the R820T2 chip. This is the tuner chip that is used in most RTL-SDR dongles, and well as on the Airspy R2 and Mini SDRs. It has a programmable IF bandwidth and high pass filter which can be used to filter neighboring interfering signals out to reduce imaging and overload problems. In the RTL-SDR and Airspy drivers the bandwidth is adjusted to a fixed setting depending on the bandwidth selected.

To perform the tests he uses a noise source connected to his Airspy, varies the IF filter bandwidth and then plots the results. He finds that there are two adjustments for the IF filter, one coarse and one fine, as well as an additional high pass filter. By manually reducing these settings it's possible to get better filtering at the expense of reduced bandwidth. 

He notes that reducing the bandwidth is useful for his two apps, acarsdec and vdlm2dec which receive ACARS and VDL aircraft signals. These signals are not high in bandwidth so they can easily benefit from tighter filtering.