Those of you who tune into the club net may have heard me saying I was playing around with a TV tuner stick and free Windows SDR software again. Part of the reason for doing this was to see what operation with a proper SDR transceiver such as a Flex or Anan might be like. I ended up trying the latest versions of six different software packages and thought there might be some interest in my notes here on the club website. The stick I own is an E4000 RTL2832 DTV dongle, which is of course receive-only. As far as I can tell it tunes from around 23.1 MHz to about 1800 MHz with some gaps. Aside from two DAB-specific programs most of the others allowed me to tune into the local 6m beacon, FM broadcasts, air band signals, 2m and 70cm beacons and repeaters, 70cm beacons & repeaters as well as allowing me to see signals from DAB and DTV multiplexes and mobile phone networks. These latter types were all too wide to see anything other than part of the signal at a time. Most of the programs rely on use of a DLL called ExtIO_RTL2832.dll to control the stick. There appear to be multiple versions of ExtIO_RTL2832.dll written by different authors, supporting different feature-sets of different tuner sticks! You need to use a program called Zadig to replace the standard Windows TV tuner driver too. Fortunately I started at www.rtl-sdr.com, which helped a lot. Many of the programs I tried (details below) have amateur-friendly features such as variable bandwidth, noise blankers and squelch. All except the DAB-specific programs show both received spectrum and waterfall charts. Some programs require you to set a 'LO' frequency. This is not a conventional local oscillator but is the mid-point of the frequency band to be received and displayed on the spectrum chart. The user can then tune to any frequency within that range. Another feature most has was a way to correct for any frequency error caused by the stick. GB3UHF was used as a frequency standard and tuning errors successfully corrected for. All of the programs are either Open Source or Freeware. Some may also have paid-for versions with more features. Although I believe the information is accurate, the programs were all in their different ways a bit unfriendly so it is entirely possible that there are features, or ways of setting the programs up, that I didn’t discover. SDRuno 1.06 from www.SDRplay.com Designed for use with wideband SDRplay dongle but will work with RTL dongle (with a reduced feature set). NB The latest software version is v1.22 but the install package for that only has the v1.06 version for use with non-SDRplay tuners.  Click on these screenshots to see full size Plusses
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SDR# v1.0.0.1637 from www.airspy.com Now optimised for Airspy SDR radios but still works with RTL dongles.  Plusses
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HDSDR v2.76 from www.hdsdr.de As you can see from the URL, HDSDR comes from Germany. The website is in English though! Unfortunately there is no manual, although a few amateurs have posted helpful articles online. HDSDR is based on the much older Winrad and some documentation on that may be helpful. During testing I discovered that the upper frequency limits on my dongle were:
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SDR Console v2.3 (aka SDR-radio) from www.sdr-radio.com I really wanted to like this program, which is written by Simon Brown of HRD fame. Unfortunately it was a pig to install, requiring four dll's to be installed before it worked. Some of these were documented but on installation there was an error message that MSVCR100.dll was missing too. A quick Google turned up the fact that this is a redistributable part of Microsoft Visual C+ + 2010. Fortunately I was able to install the Visual C+ + 2010 redistributables from the Microsoft website. Unfortunately I also encountered what appeared to be a bug: at one point the frequency was changed but the decoded and displayed spectrum didn't change. The only solution seemed to be a restart. v3 of the program is currently available in Beta.  Plusses
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DAB-specific programs QT-dab v1.0 alpha from www.sdr-j.tk/index.html Initially this program seemed prone to audio glitches and decoding errors. Turning AGC off and increasing gain to almost maximum solved this.  Plusses
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WELLE.IO v1.0-rc2 from www.welle.io This was the most user-friendly of the two DAB programs. I did discover one bug however. The program can be used in full-screen or 'player' sizes. Mine is stuck in full screen!  Plusses
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This wasn't intended to be a full review of the SDR programs but should give you some idea of their relative benefits. All seem to be under active development so may already be even better than I found. They are all free, so why not give one or two a go today? 73 de Mike G4RAA |
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