SDRplay Community Forum

Hi all!

I have a 6,5m USB cable. When i connect a USB Wifi antenna to this cable the antenna works fine. Just to say that the cable is ok. When i connect the SDRPlay to this cable my Mac cannot find the SDRPlay. Is there anything i can do to make the SDRPlay work with this USB extension cable?

Thanks,

Ton.

USB is limited to 5m.
It is strange that you could get a 6.5m cable.
But here I once tried 2 cables 5+2 m and it worked.
I think the trick is to use big ,fat cables not the tiny ones that cause too much loss of power supply.
Also not all USB ports on a computer are equal.
Here hungry devices like hard drives work better on the ports of the mother board than those
on the front panel.

Ok, so maybe i measured it wrong and the cable is 5m. I was just guesstimating. In any case, a harddrive works, the Wifi antenna works, both RTL adapters work, it's just the SDRplay that times out. Bummer. I had such a great idea of having the SDRplay outside for a better antenna position. Bad luck....

I made some tests with this cable: http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=1 ... &p_id=7531

It's a 10M active USB 2.0 cable extension with TypeB connectors) and it seems to work fine even at 8Mhz. Your results might vary, normally these adapters don't work for SDRs correctly, (and other high streaming USB devices) but it helps that the SDRPlay requires around 100mA of current.

The "optimal" is using USB fiber extenders like this one: http://www.icron.com/products/icron-bra ... nger-2224/ but the cost is a lot of times more than the SDRPlay.

Edit: Corning is selling an USB 3.0 Optical Extension cable at around $100USD for the smallest size. That cable could definitely be interesting: http://www.corning.com/opcomm/OpticalCa ... 75-AEN.pdf

I had a similar issue.

First, make sure it is a USB 2 or 3 cable, and not USB 1.

Second, for extended length, you need an active USB cable. I just got this one and it works great for me:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002D ... detailpage

Third, if it still doesnt work, you could try to add a powered USB hub to the end and connect to that (but the active cable should work).

Hope that helps...

mike

Thanks for the replies. I will try an active cable next.

Ton.

I use skylet usb cable and feel well. You can search it on amazon.
http://skylet.tech/a/skylet/PRODUCT/Cab ... 3.html?b53