My new SDRplay RSP

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zenity.st@gmail.com
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat Apr 16, 2016 3:07 pm

My new SDRplay RSP

Post by zenity.st@gmail.com » Sat Apr 30, 2016 3:34 pm

Like many, I've been a keen SWL'er for a number of years, when time, space and finance allowed for it.
I've used everything I could get my hands on, from old valve sets, to modern low cost Chinese sets, and always found those fun, but often limiting in certain ways, either limitations of the radios themselves, or simply that in some cases, they just cannot do absolutely everything one can imagine with the ever present flow of radio signals in various formats.

So, I got myself a cheap, DVB-T dongle, and was pretty much impressed with them, if one disregards the poor, or essentially non-existent, performance below 30Mhz, OK, most can be tricked down to 15Mhz, or a bit lower with software/driver modifications, or down do DC with hardware modifications, even then the image issues, and general quirkyness limited their effectiveness again.

So, after a bit of saving, and persuasion, I managed to snag myself a very nice SDRplay RSP.

And frankly, I'm loving it, it's like night and day, and so far I haven't found any issues that are not due to my own rather amateur random wire dipole in the attic, it's not the best wire to use, basically it's two cores from an old twin twisted pair telephone cable, strung from the mid rafters and linked to some old, and cheap lossy coax that happened to have a PL239 one end, and an SMA at the other, so I'm waiting for another outdoor and better antenna solution, probably an SE-1500 or similar.

So far I'm still fiddling about with various virtual audio solutions for utility decoding, as well as the familiar broadcast HF and amateur following I tend to be used to, and the SDRplay simply sails through it pretty well.

On the software side, I use HDSDR, SDR#, SDR Console (V2 and V3), and Cubic SDR as the mood takes me, each has their strengths, and weaknesses, no real go to all-rounder yet, tho HDSDR and SDR Console v3 are most often my solutions, the others have their particular uses.

All in all, it's probably the best investment in radio equipment I've made in the last few years.

(Now to persuade Mrs that I really need a quad core cpu and an external antenna as well) ...
Last edited by zenity.st@gmail.com on Thu Jan 01, 1970 12:00 am, edited 0 times in total.
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