dcopeland
Newbie
I have a receiver for spread spectrum signal which must receive a signal ~10dB below the noise floor. I am trying to establish the bare minimum gain from the RX input to the ADC converter input. For a non-spread-spectrum signal, I would normally provide enough gain to place the noise floor at the ADC at least 12dB above the ADC quantization noise floor to minimize ADC impact to RX noise figure. My question is - do I have to add another 10dB of gain for the spread-spectrum signal to assure reception with the same NF, or can I use the same gain as for non-spread?