SDRPlay on Mac OSX

[Toontje]

Has anybody tried CubicSDR? Works great with an RTL-SDR adapter, but i'm not sure if it works with SDRplay. Support for gr-osmosdr is on the to-do list, but not checked off yet.

Can anyone try it?

Thanks,

Ton.

[Sasan]

No it does not support gr-osmosdr yet, so in practice you can't use SDRPlay on Mac (I've tried all programs)
But it works as expected with SDRSharp and HDSDR on Windows

[Toontje]

Yeah, but i don't have Windows, so i will have to wait until someone starts to support the SDRplay.

Too bad for me.

[Sasan]

I'm in the same position!
My main system is a MacBook Pro, so I need Mac support.
The binary drivers are working on Mac, but there's no software or library that communicates to these drivers correctly.
The latest version of gr-osmosdr supports SDRPlay (you should enable it when building from source), but you can't still use it correctly in programs like gqrx or GNURadio

[lowearthorbit]

If you sort the SDR community forum by #views, the "SDRplay on MacOS" is at the top. I think Windows 10 issues
are taking the priority now but hopefully the Mac community will get a reply back on the status of this fairly soon.
I've gotten as far as you- gr-osmosdr builds OK (at least, the +sdrplay option shows as TRUE when running cmake, etc),
and gqrx recognizes the unit, but from this point on I can't get the unit to demodulate the signals when tuned to known
radio stations.

[Sasan]

SDRPlay is very good at its price. Its developers are working hard to address multiple issues simultaneously.
What they've failed so far, is the lack of proper communication between them and community.
Is there any roadmap for things like removing the frequency gap or support for GNURadio (by having good and stable gr-osmosdr implementation)
Are these even on their TODO list? Can community help them? When we can expect to see some of these important features/changes?

These are not meant to undermine their works. The reason we expect more from SDRPlay guys is that they've raised the bar with this high quality SDR.
I think what's happening here, is focusing on actual technical work and forget about marketing and PR (That's why I proposed setting up a wiki to gather all issues/bugs/todos/etc in one place)

[Toontje]

I think what potentially confuses a lot of SDRplay buyers is the fact that they have a platforms section on their website which you need to read through to understand that your first impression (SDRplay supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, Pi and Android) is actually wrong.

[sdrplay]

We are a small team and we are aware of the issues some of you are seeing.

The frequency gap version of the API will be released today. We have had it in beta testing and we have been working on the documentation to support it so that it's clear on how it's used.

We will also be releasing an updated version of the EXTIO plugin today that takes advantage of the frequency gap version of the API - again, we wanted to make sure it was as usable as possible before releasing it.

SDR-Console will require Simon Brown to modify it to take advantage of the new API so that will take longer.

The new Windows driver that we will release today has also been in testing. Whilst it seems to resolve issues with desktops, we still have problems with tablets.

gr-osmosdr is the very next issue on the list. Better documentation for the Ubuntu path which has been our golden standard as it were. Then to take a look at how it works on other platforms including Mac.

Beyond that we also have ADS-B to do and we are also continuing to review our plugins/software, supporting customers and better supporting our various platform offering/delivery flows.

As ever, we are always happy to explain where we are with our development and we do reach out to the community for help and testing.

Hope that helps,

Best regards,

SDRplay

[Toontje]

Thanks for getting back to us. And yes, from the little time i know SDRplay i did experience that you are communicating with the community. Keep it up, so we know what to expect.
What are you doing with ADS-B? I hope you are not going to write the next SDR software. Or at least, that writing SDR software has a higher priority than writing platform support. We already have plenty of software already available and using VAC's we can link them all together. So if i were you, which i perfectly realise i am not, i would give platform support and driver optimisation a higher priority than protocol support.

Just my €0.02

[sdrplay]

I think what potentially confuses a lot of SDRplay buyers is the fact that they have a platforms section on their website which you need to read through to understand that your first impression (SDRplay supporting Windows, Mac, Linux, Pi and Android) is actually wrong.

Can you explain what you mean? The hardware and supplied API work on all of the platforms we support. Plugins, libraries and applications that use the API are something completely different. Anyone can take the API and build on top of it and we can help support that process. There are people on this forum that have done exactly that for example and we have customers happily using the API natively on those platforms including Mac so we know it works.

Providing those things ourselves is taking us some time to do, so we will get there and do really appreciate everyone's patience.

Best regards,

SDRplay