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No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2016 8:20 am
by trevatxtal
I an unable to find a direct contact address for SDRplay.
I feel very upset, SDRplay advertise this product as working on Linux It dos not.maybe via wine which is buggy and a windows emulator, Not Linux.
Win 7 NO unless the resolution is very high.
Why do you not publish minimum requirements for all systems.
Why do you not answer your followups from START HERE when the system will not work.
So far many hours of work and over 120 quid wasted.
All my other SDR dongles work on Linux and Windows. SDRuno software is not up to the Job.
Please explain.

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2016 12:08 pm
by Tech_Support
The support contact is support@sdrplay.com
This is listed both on our website and on the card insert that comes with your RSP.
There is Linux support for the RSP1 if you are having problems I suggest you email the above address.
It is impossible to list a minimum spec for the RSP1 or RSP2 because the minimum spec is determined by what application software you use and not the hardware itself. Some applications (such as ADS-B) will quite happily run on a Raspberry Pi or a smart Phone or tablet (SDR Touch). Others require at least a decent dual core x86 CPU with 4GB of RAM. If you want to process up to 10 MHz of spectrum, you will probably want a core i5, but again, it also depends what else you may be using your PC for at the same time.

We do answer support requests that come in via the Start Here process. I am not sure why we have not seen yours, but if you can email the above address, we will try to help you.

Sincerely

SDRplay Tech_Support

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 7:32 am
by trevatxtal
You have made one product from two SDRplay and SDRuno.
That is the combination that requires minimum spec, NONE of my older portables will work with this combination due to screen resolution.
It will work on a portable that is less than one year old.
SDRuno is non resizable on some windows and only partly on others, that is poor software such problems went out 15 to 20 years ago.
Linux support! you do not supply a Linux executable or it is hard to find on your site. So if it is there please where is it.
A copy of my complaints and your answers will be forwarded to Practical Wireless and to RadCom , so that others can decide whether it is me or your advertising before making the mistake of purchasing a incomplete product.
If you had done a little research before saying there is no record of a problem via the Start Here process.
You would have realized Work emails and office emails could be different.
I would be foolish to publish an address on a forum.
Yes I will be contacting you direct, possibly with a view to obtain my money back.

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 7:37 am
by trevatxtal
I have again looked at your site www.sdrplay.com.
And no there is no contact address.
There was no slip in the envelope, and it was purchased direct so have words with you packers please.

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Wed Dec 07, 2016 9:23 am
by Tech_Support
Dear Trevatxtal,
If you look under the "Contact" tab on our website, you will find all contact details for the company including the one for support:

http://www.sdrplay.com/contact/

All RSPs are shipped in plastic boxes with a card insert (inside the plastic box). All contact details are printed on this card insert. It is the same card insert that gave you the details of how to find the 'Start Here' installation link on our website.

As I said previously, we can find no record of an unanswered 'Start Here' support request, but if we have missed it somehow, all I can do is apologise. It was certainly not intentional. It is worth checking your spam folders, just to ensure that any response hasn't gone in there. If you wish to contact us directly at support@sdrplay.com, we will do our best to help you.

Regarding Linux support, please look again at our website under 'Downloads". On this page, you should see a tab called Linux. Under the Linux tab, there are links to downloads for the API/Driver for Linux and for a software programme called Cubic SDR. We haven't developed Cubic SDR ourselves, but it can be compiled for Linux and is proving to be very popular for many users.

I don't really follow your comment about us having made one product. We have two hardware products and one software product. People use a range of different software packages with the RSP1. As well as SDRuno, you can use HDSDR, SDR Console and SDR sharp (release 1361 or earlier) under Windows for general purpose SDR applications. On a Apple Mac, you can use Cubic SDR. On an Android platform, you can use SDR Touch. All details can be found via the downloads page. If you have purchased an RSP2, this is a brand new product and w currently only support SDRuno, but that will be changing very soon as we will shortly be adding support for the other platforms listed.

As long as you purchased your RSP from us, have had it for less than 14 days and return it to us, undamaged, complete and in its original packaging, we can issue you with a refund. If this is the path that you wish to follow, please contact finance@sdrplay.com and they will arrange this for you.

Sincerely

SDRplay Tech_Support

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Mon Jan 30, 2017 10:56 pm
by 13dka
I took the time to write up a few bugs I noticed in an email, and another email laying out some feature request, and emailed those to support@sdrplay.com (as generally requested by you) on Dec. 14th 2016. So far I have not received any reply (spam folders being checked on a daily basis) and the emails didn't "bounce" either.

This kind of emails does not require an individual and verbose response, however I would have expected to receive a short copy&paste note that you received them so I know they didn't end up in YOUR spam folder.

A recent post in the General forum indicates another case of missing response to emails, so I can't help thinking there's some room for improvement. :)

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 10:48 am
by 13dka
Hello? Seriously? No reaction to emails and in the forum? Do you wish I"d rather not try to contact you? Otherwise I could still try smoke signs and drumming but I"d like to know if it"s worthwhile to set my drums on fire.

I just stumbled upon another bug suspect (switching antenna inputs a few times makes the RSP2 conk out in SDR Console and the ExtIO) but maybe you can imagine that my motivation to find a recipe to reproduce this (or how to fix that so I can select the HiZ input again) is currently not exactly overwhelming.

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 1:58 pm
by Tech_Support
Dear Ollie,
We did receive your email listing various bugs on December 14th. We have many thousands of users and get a very large number of emails flagging bugs or suggesting feature changes to either the hardware or software. Unless these emails contain a specific request for help on a particular issue, we simply note them as we need to focus on people with particular problems.
As your email was flagging various bugs and ended with "If you have any questions, please let me know" we simply treated it as a 'FYI' email. If you feel that this was rude or unresponsive, then please accept our apologies. It was certainly not intended as such.
The previous complaint in this thread was rather different. In this case, because the user had not fully understood that you need to actually complete the 'Start-Here' process before a support request email is despatched, we did NOT receive emails from him as he had supposed. We don't know why he had difficulties finding the contact details on our website, because they are clearly there, but as he had not received responses to emails that he thought had been sent, he became angry and preferred to air is grievances in public. We tracked down his email address ourselves from his forum registration details and reached out to him ourselves to establish direct contact, but this did not seem to help at that point.
Because this forum is a community forum, designed for the community to share information, we do not monitor the details all of the content. We mostly check that the content is appropriate for this forum. That we why we ask anyone who has a specific problem to email our support team. We certainly try to respond to all queries or request for help, but it is not always obvious to us that senders are expecting a reply to some of the emails that they send us.

Once again, if you feel snubbed by our lack of response, please accept our apologies. It was not our intent.

Sincerely

SDRplay Tech_Support

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 12:32 am
by 13dka
Well, thanks for that! Yes, like I said it was a FIY thing indeed, but today's ubiquitous difficulties with email delivery usually require an automatic reply (most companies do that) so the sender knows the message reached its destination. Imagine you read about a lack of response (for whatever reason) from a company on several places (here, eHam, RTL-SDR), you'd even more kind of want to know if your message was ending up in some black hole and your efforts were in vain.

Without autoresponder it's a simple one-liner you could copy&paste like "We have received your message, thank you! We'll respond ASAP if necessary, Best, SDRplay". That's a few clicks to avoid making customers feel ignored, who then probably won't dash off to complain about your "abysmal customer support", and you usually have to do this only once.

But I'll be honest, I'm currently a bit ticked off indeed, and maybe you'll understand why after you read this piece of my mind:

Having asked a few unanswered questions and getting not much feedback in general in this forum, I cannot understand the repeatedly made point that you don't have the time to read all posts in - just of all - your own company forum, which you apparently feel is just an uncomfortable necessity, provided out of courtesy, that has actually little to do with that company.

Instead, you ask people to email you (well...), or to post on Assbook or on your Google Plus group. Not to mention how goddamn noisy and inconvenient FB and Google groups can be (ever tried to access those on an older netbook/tablet and/or on slow internet?), or how controversial both of these platforms are - I find it hard to understand why you refrain from utilizing your own low-threshold company community forum for that first and foremost. Here's how this fires back:

A recent post by a member of your beta-test group indicated that you only asked those in that group how a scanner function in SDRuno should look like, that's why I wanted to make sure I get heard too, so I wrote an email, which appeared to be ignored, and I knew I can't just post that here because you potentially won't notice it anyway. This has much potential to be aggravating in my book, it makes customers who signed up for this forum feel like a second class bunch of <insert derogatory term here>, not worthy of getting the same share of information and involvement as the others. That's only one of the possible bad ways to perceive this, and at any rate it's pretty discouraging.

I can't imagine how this is supposed to be any good for you - instead of concentrating all information on your own forum, you prefer to disperse feedback, bug reports and other community contributions across several channels and platforms, members of which not knowing what the others on the other channels posted, contributed or reported. I find this quite ineffective for all parties involved!

Maintaining a central company-owned forum for the community, used by both company staff and customers for open information exchange and as a support frontend is a proven way of reducing support workload and manpower requirements (in particular for small companies!), due to the voluntary work contributed by the community. It has the potential to speed up response times way beyond what a support department could ever do, simply because it's populated 24/7, giving you a tiered support scheme practically for free, because many of your customers are obviously happy to contribute, it's easily searchable and and at least those who bother to use that search will find previous answers to all sorts of support requests, or will be pointed to those by members and so they won't show up in your email inbox.

It keeps the maximum number of knowledgeable voluntary supporters, ideas and contributions at one place, to both your and your customers advantage, it's keeping ALL of your customers equally informed and involved, it can serve as some crude kind of database for bugs (if you don't want to bother with a public bug tracking system) and feature requests and it would have kept me from wanting to email my request, thus avoiding the current issue in first place. It will also make sure nothing of your product and company history gets lost in potentially volatile 3rd-party channels beyond your control, platforms that also have a potential to be a quite reliable repellent for the brightest of minds among your customers (no I'm certainly not talking about myself, they're occasionally also repelling dumbasses like me).

Of course this is not going to happen if you discourage just of all this part of your community with your official attitude of "OK, there's your playpen, have at it but don't bother us, we don't want to read all that, you can't reach us here anyway". Of course you know best how this doesn't work out too well anyway, so now you have three platforms to check and maintain, while customers in this one may feel like they're punished for having resentments against the platforms you are piggybacking on to basically try to do most of what I wrote above, just way more noisy and messy. Any maintenance effort you save there gets probably added back on this end anyway and you probably didn't win anything, instead you are multiplying the potential risks of community management by 3.

Companies often misunderstand the role of "social networking", it's a great marketing and one-way communication/broadcast device, but I don't think it flies well enough to be the communication mainstay of a special interest company and community like this, with customer demographics that makes forcing them onto those sound like a rather bad idea anyway.

That's of course all your decision, your policies, your company and certainly none of MY business, but I sure felt the frustration this can cause. BTW, I have no problem reading all of the few new posts here and replying to some, during my work hours, but since I noticed how little you (as the host) want to have to do with this forum and how little impact any of my contributions made here will have on the development, I pretty much lost all motivation to do so.


P.S. This is really FYI, no need to respond. I can see that his has been delivered. See what I mean?

Re: No direct contact to SDRplay support.

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 2:56 pm
by sdrplay
Dear Ollie,

Thank you for your post. I want to reassure you that we read EVERY email that comes into us and we do take on board all comments regarding hardware and software development. It's very difficult for us to say exactly if and when something might be implemented so we often make notes that we will refer to later. We understand that people may not always be confident that a message has got through so in future, we will make a point of replying to every email even if it's just to say that it has been seen and read.

Regarding the various forms of communication between ourselves and our customers, we try to be as accessible as possible. I want to slightly correct what you said about how we ask people to communicate with us...

We always ask people to contact our support email if they have a question or problem regarding our hardware/software. We do not ask people to contact us via this forum, Facebook or Google Plus (I'm not even sure we have a Google Plus method of communication). The intent of this forum was always to be a vehicle for our customers to share their knowledge and ideas and it does say this clearly at the top of the page. The reason for this approach is quite simply that after 5 posts from an individual, all further posts go through un-moderated. Because of the way the forum is structured, it is sometimes possible to miss posts that become buried in a thread where someone may actually be looking for a solution to a particular problem, where the theme of the thread is not support related. If we receive an email it will not get missed.

Aside from asking us direct questions about our products on the support email, there are occasions where there is a wider issue regarding third party software or hardware or even someone asking for a suggested method of making measurements or digital decoding techniques for example. In these cases, we often ask people to ask the question on other systems as there are a lot of people with various experiences that will be better qualified and experienced to provide help and assistance. These systems include the unofficial Facebook user group (which we have no involvement with) and our community forum. We do try to comment on them when we can but we stress that these are community forums for users to help users.

Our support teams monitor them when they can in their own time and comment when if they have knowledge about the questions or topics being discussed.

We have accounts on Facebook and Twitter because these are popular ways of informing customers about product developments. We always announce these developments on our website blog and community forum as well so we hope that we cover as many systems that people choose to use. It's also fair to say that our development team also provide support and at times nearing a release of an update it may be that we don't have the coverage across all systems that we would do at other times. We apologise if we have given you the impression that we don't read or value your or others inputs, because we do read and value all responses (good or bad).

Best regards,

SDRplay Support