I am working on a project that requires me to get signal strength of various spectrums of rf. Example....I need to sense cell phones, ham radios, am, fm, wifi, etc...now i do not need to send data to them or hear or receive data...I am simply interested in obtaining the strength of a given frequency in an environment.
I have done a bit of research about this and I know that I cannot afford a spectrum analyzer ha, but i am curious if certain hardwares can be hacked to help detect these. ie...can a xbee give me rssi of things in the 2.4ghz range rather than just other xbee's?
any help with regard to how to grab signal strength is much appreciated!
XBees are designed to weed out data from devices other than those they are specifically configured to communicate with. So, no, you won't be able to use one to determine generic signal strength in the 2.4 GHz band.
The signal strength value that the XBee returns is that for the XBee that it is communicating with.
Thanks PaulS...a bit as i suspected..and Richard i have been googling just that and it seems like i need a transceiver of a given spectrum that has an rssi output like that of the xbee...
thanks for the comments and please any other ideas and/or references will all help