Hi Robin,
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply the Pluto was "worse" than others.
It's really that as you, and I thought that was really great
about your talk, showed that SDRs aren't "totally harmless
toys". Indeed, I hadn't even noticed so far the different
band-specific paths of the B2x0 were gone on the B200mini!
And yes, who am I to tell you that, but that's the price you
pay for frequency-agile SDR: Either you spend a lot of money on
dedicated filtering per band (E310, TwinRX), or you get the
cheap flexibility at the expense of selectivity. That might be
the reason why an R&S spectrum analyzer might be a tad more
expensive then the average COTS SDR device that we're
considering below.
But the fact that you need your own filters, in the end, is –
in my experience – something that people building systems are
very willing to accept, because you can use one and the same SDR
device that you got to know intimately in products which you
optimize for the bands that you'll actually use in that
incarnation of your system by adding (relatively cheap) filters
for exactly what you care about. That's why it makes sense for
the B200mini to lack these filters – the form factor means it
lends itself to systems integration. And that's also why it
makes sense for the Pluto to not have filters – aside from the
(extremely nice) price tag, hell, it's an experimentation
platform, so the flexibility is more important than the raw
signal quality.
So, yeah, my wording was misleading there – thank you for the
response!
Don't see why you need filters. Analog components with 220dB of
dynamic range ahead of 27-bit ADCs, and no filters required :)