Just set up and looking forward to a weekend of meeting customers, old and new, from all over Europe at Ham Radio, Freidrichshafen today:

Andy from SDRplay will be demonstrating the new RSPduo at Hall/Stand No. A1-339, hosted by Funk24.net

Despite some heavy rain, day 1 of the Dayton Hamvention saw strong interest in SDR and SDRplay in particular – the news of our new dual-band RSPduo was well received and the Ham Radio Outlet booth was busy.

The first customer of the day, was Marc Pilotte, WB9DBD, pictured below:

SDRplay formally presented the RSPduo at the New Products Showcase event.  The slides can be downloaded from:  https://sdrplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/DaytonSDRduoLaunchSlidesV2.pdf 

And the HRO booth got busier:

Here’s a picture of the SDRplay team including Paul as founder member of the unofficial SDRplay Facebook group, taken at the end of the day after closing time:

Left to right: Jon, Steve, Paul, Mike and Andy

Looking forward to day 2.

Announcing the RSPduo

Today at the Dayton Hamvention, SDRplay is announcing the launch of a new Software Defined Radio product – the RSPduo.

The RSPduo is a radical new addition to the RSP line of SDR receivers from SDRplay. Architecturally, it is different from any previous RSP in that it features dual independent tuners, both piped through a single high-speed USB 2.0 interface.

The SDRplay RSPduo is a dual-tuner wideband full featured 14-bit SDR which covers the entire RF spectrum from 1kHz to 2GHz giving 10MHz of spectrum visibility. Initially using Windows based ‘SDRuno’ supplied by SDRplay, you can simultaneously monitor two completely separate 2MHz bands of spectrum anywhere between 1kHz and 2GHz.

Superficially the RSPduo looks identical to the highly popular RSP2pro and will be able to operate in a very similar way. However, it also allows a completely new and exciting set of usage scenarios such as:

1. Simultaneous monitoring of two widely spaced bands – e.g. 40m (HF) and 2m (VHF)
2. Mixing and matching applications simultaneously – e.g. ADS-B and ATC scanning
3. Phase and time coherent demodulation of two receivers

Scenario 3 is very difficult to achieve with two separate USB devices because of the uncertainty of USB latency. The RSPduo overcomes this limitation because all traffic goes through a single USB interface, thus enabling the possibility of the development of various types of diversity demodulation such as: spatial, frequency and polarisation which can bring huge benefits in terms of improved performance.

As well as adding a second independently controlled tuner, which in itself, offers a whole new set of exciting usage possibilities, the SDRduo features 14bit ADCs and a completely re-designed RF front end. These changes provide better RF selectivity and even more dynamic range, offering outstanding performance under extremely challenging reception conditions. The combination of performance and features makes the RSPduo our highest spec RSP yet and sets a new benchmark in the sub $300 SDR market.

Lots of great new videos are appearing on YouTube showing the Dual Tuner RSPduo in use. Just search for RSPduo in the YouTube Search bar.

We will be announcing and showcasing a completely new product at Hamvention in Dayton Ohio on May 18^th.   Building on the strengths of SDRplay’s underlying hardware technology, coupled with the power of SDRuno software, this radical new product will provide radio enthusiasts, engineers and researchers, with unique and truly exciting capabilities.  Watch out for the announcement from Dayton, or visit our website at www.SDRplay.com  on Friday 18^th May, 7am EDT.  (this has moved forward and is now at 7am Dayton time and 12 noon UK time on Friday 18th May)

If you are visiting the Hamvention, come and see it in action on the Ham Radio Outlet booths 2506-2507 and 3307-3311.

Steve Andrews contacted the SDRplay forum recently to share ideas for a new Spectrum Analyser tool for use with SDRplay RSPs.  A lively discussion started, with a lot of enthusiasm and encouragement from the user community, for something optimised for these devices.   Steve is progressing well with the software development and hopes to have an Alpha release of the basic tool available during May.  You can follow the discussion, review progress and add your comments by joining the SDRplay forum and going to: https://sdrplay.com/community/viewforum.php?f=12 where we have created a section especially for the Spectrum Analyser topic.

Thanks to all those of you who have created YouTube videos of what you’re doing with your RSPs.  I think the user community really appreciate them. This morning this one popped up from Jarrad, VK3BL which shows how well an RSP can complement a Kenwood transceiver to give you the kind of panadapter graphics (and second receiver possibility) which is tough to achieve with a self contained rig and bandscope.  With computer monitors becoming bigger and cheaper all the time, the RSP option makes more and more sense.

If you are able to do demonstrate something new and unique, we’d especially like to hear from you, or videos in other languages than English.   We have several playlists on our YouTube channel

We are hoping to release an update for SDRuno in the next couple of weeks.  It has been a while since the last one and we will say more about what’s included in the next few days.

Don’t forget,  SDRplay will be attending Dayton Hamvention (May 18-20) with demos planned in conjunction with Ham Radio Outlet. We will also be at Ham Radio, Friedrichshafen (June 1-3) in conjunction with Funk24 and Funktechnik-Dathe.  We look forward to seeing you there 🙂

The International Space Station crew have been sending SSTV pictures this week . Over on the independent SDRplay Facebook group on https://www.facebook.com/groups/sdrplay  ,Roger Need reported: “Got this one with a 2M magmount stuck to a pizza pan inside the hamshack – using RSP1A, SDR-Console V3 and MMSSTV.”

The Facebook group has over 8500 members and is a safe and friendly forum for SDRplay users to exchange tips and advice for whatever they’re doing with the RSP.  It’s also a good place to find out whether an RSP would meet your needs for an SDR receiver.  For those wary of Facebook, I recommend providing a minimum of personal information – first name and approximate location (within say 20 miles) is all that’s needed out of courtesy to other members (propagation comments, or suggestions on where to get components become meaningless if you pretend you live somewhere completely different from reality!) – the rest can be fictional!  The group is a “closed”  group in order to maintain a collaborative spirit and to keep the spammers out.

Many thanks to the many YouTubers out there making great videos of what they’re capturing using RSPs.  Keep them coming!  We try to showcase the ones we spot, by “liking” and linking them to our playlists on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/SDRplayRSP  – for those of you considering whether an RSP makes sense for you, if you go to YouTube and search for “SDRplay” and an additional search subject you will likely find some informative information.     Here’s an example of one posted only yesterday by Pete Sobye, G0PNM:  https://youtu.be/OWiw5HM3d1g – I came across that by simply doing a YouTube search for “SDRplay Panadapter”

As a reminder of the full list of alternative ways to get help and support – take a look at https://sdrplay.com/contact/  (including a link to our own community forum of over 4000 members, where you don’t even  need to be a Facebook user! )

A note of apology to users for an unscheduled outage we suffered with our website on Tuesday night (UK time) – it was due to an attempt at a malicious attack which we quickly identified, but meant we had to go off the air while we double checked everything.  It was bad timing since it coincided with the one day when Simon Brown over at SDR Console was performing scheduled maintenance to his Version 3 server and website!  At the last count, of the 48 actually working remote servers, exactly 50% of them (24) were SDRplay RSPs!    Take a look on  http://www.sdr-radio.com/Software/Version3/Server  to see where the publicly available RSPs are.   This video guide shows how you can access these remote servers and how you can make your own radio available for either private or public remote access.  Please note that the default gain settings in SDR Console are not always optimum on all frequencies – also make sure in the case of a remote RSP2 or RSP2pro that you are selecting the correct antenna!

Finally, just to let you know that SDRplay will be attending Dayton Hamvention (May 18-20) with demos planned in conjunction with Ham Radio Outlet. We will also be at Ham Radio, Friedrichshafen (June 1-3) in conjunction with Funk24 and Funktechnik-Dathe.  We look forward to seeing you there 🙂

There’s a video guide on the process of setting up the Raspberry Pi3 with an RSP over on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WvcbnoaYnL8