We uploaded a demo video showing how PandwaRF’s RF power amplifiers work and why they are useful.

All PandwaRF are equipped with RF power amplifiers for reception and transmission.

RF amplifiers, as their name suggests, amplify the transmitted or received signal. For example, if your PandwaRF is far away from the target to capture, it can have some difficulties in capturing correctly the signal. The further you are, the weaker the signal is. With the amplifiers, the PandwaRF can amplify a weak signal and therefore capture more precise data from the remote.

In the demo video we followed two scenarios to show the effects of the RX RF power amplifiers on the SpecAn (Spectrum Analyzer):

  1. With all the amplifiers turned OFF: when we captured the RSSI level of the remote we could see a distinct peak around -40 dBm for the 433,850 MHz frequency. And we did not see a lot of noise around it.
  2. With the RX power amplifiers enabled: we restarted a SpecAn and we captured the signal. And we immediately observed a huge peak with a long falling edge on the 2 sides, because of the noise. When we clicked on the highest part we saw the RSSI now at -25 dBm for 433,850 MHz, thus a 15 dB increase.

In conclusion:

  • When the target is close to the PandwaRF (especially in RX mode): we don’t need the amplifiers because they are also amplifying the noise. It can be more difficult to separate the useful peak from the noise. This is one reason why the Rogue frequency finder feature can return wrong results.
  • If we are far away: it is important to activate the Power amplifiers for the PandwaRF to capture the signal more accurately.

Thank you for watching!