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Gerald Youngblood (K5SDR) of FlexRadio wrote of optimal receiver noise figure relationship to antenna noise in a blog posting about SDR receivers.

This article discusses that posting in the context of linear receivers, ie effects of intermodulation distortion are not included.

His gives the following advice:

For optimal weak signal performance near the atmospheric (antenna) noise floor you want your receiver noise floor (sensitivity/MDS) to be 8 to 10 dB below the noise coming from the antenna.  For strong signal reception, less sensitivity is almost always better.

The terminology is not industry standard, but that is quite  usual for hams who have a need to redefine well known terms, and this is really loose with implied equivalence (eg sensitivity/MDS).

ITU-R P.372-14 speaks of natural noise as including atmospheric noise due to lightning, and also speaks of man made noise.

It is likely Youngblood is actually talking about man made noise since he uses man made noise figures from an earlier revision of P.372.

Optimal is a compromise between weak signal performance (ie S/N degradation due to internal receiver noise) and handling of strong signals that might clip in the ADC of an SDR receiver.

He gives a table of measured MDS (minimum discernable signal, which actually is synonymous with Noisefloor) for recommended configurations of a Flex 6600 radio on several bands.

Above is Youngblood’s data with my calculated values in yellow and orange for: Continue reading Optimum receive system noise figure for given ambient noise – Flex 6600

Comments were received from some readers of the article S/N degradation is related to external noise level and receive system internal noise.

Essentially, two questions were asked:

• what is the minimum HF ambient noise level; and
• explain observation of lower HF ambient noise level.

What is the minimum ambient noise level?

Above is Fig 2 from ITU-R P.372-13 which shows some key components of total ambient noise. The solid line is entitled “minimum noise level expected”, and it is a combination of curves B, C and D. Above 0.7MHz, only curves C and D are at play. Continue reading Minimum ambient noise level – ITU-R P.372-13 guidance

A question that arises from time to time is what is the minimum receiver noise figure for a given application.

This discussion considers the question applied to linear receivers, ie receivers with zero intermodulation distortion (IMD) and other non ideal characteristics, other than their internal noise which can be described by their Noise Figure (NF).

By definition, NF is the amount by which the component or system degrades the NF, so in dB it is the difference in the S/N in to S/N out. Implicit in that definition is that it is based on source internal noise of 290K equivalent.

HF example

So for example lets say a receiver with quivalent noise bandwidth 2000Hz measures sensitivity of -125dBm for 10dB S/N out. We can calculate the noise in 2000Hz bandwidth from a 290K source to be -141dBm, and therefore the input S/N is -125 – -141 = 16dB. The ratio of the input S/N to output S/N is the difference in those in dB, 16-10=6dB. The NF is 6dB. We can also calculate an equivalent internal noise temperature of (10^(6/10)-1)*290=865K.

By convention, ambient noise (or external noise) is expressed in Kelvins, or dB wrt 290K. That does not imply that an antenna contributes exactly 290K. Continue reading S/N degradation is related to external noise level and receive system internal noise