SDRplay Community Forum

( I'm having difficulty putting this into words .... please be patient. )

( What's got me wondering about this .... )

- I have an SDRplay Receiver and use it with SDRuno Software - they are very impressive.

- But ... It seems to me that the receiver module could be used as the core of a more
. comprehensive receiver .... and I am wondering if anyone has done this yet ?

(background)
A long time ago my ham receiver was a Drake R-4B. Other than being somewhat
less mechanically rugged the Drake design seemed to take much of its direction from
that of the Collins 75S Receiver .... especially the permeability-tuned RF Preselector.

(Back to the present)

- Several users have commented on difficulties with images, overloading from
. nearby AM broadcast station, etc.

I am wondering if anyone else has looked at their SDRplay Receiver and went 'Hmmm',
envisioning the little-gray-box being mounted in a larger (possibly cast aluminum) box,
with proper submineature coax connecting the SDRplay Receiver to a tuned preselector,
perhaps a small RF switch and, somewhere in the coax 'plumbing', a diode-protector ?

This idea could be taken further by someone running client software in LINUX (or similar)
such that a stand-alone receiver might be viable.

Are people working on these ideas ?

- Paul, WB5AGF

Hi Paul. I did something like that with my original RSP1. I took the RSP's PCB and fitted it into a small diecast box with a homebrew filter bank. From memory I had:

LPF for < 100 KHz
LPF for < 500 KHz
LPF for <1.7 MHz
BPF for 160m amateur band
HPF for >2 MHz for general SW listening.

You may have guessed I'm a low band enthusiast. The filters were manually selected with a front panel rotary switch. These filters cleaned up all those images, especially the MW ones that made a mess of the bands below 500 KHz.
The effect of the sub 100 KHz filter was dramatic - the noise level dropped by about 20 dB when it was selected.

There are many Android-based double-din car radios that are affordably priced.
I have often imagined having one of those based around the RSP.
Hopefully, that's in the works.

IQbert said : "double-din car radios"

I am really out-of-date .... I had to go look-and-see what that meant ...

This :

https://www.soundzgood2me.com/car-audio-terms/

explained that 'Double DIN' means a radio faceplate that is 8 inches wide and 4 inches high.

(I knew about DIN connectors but was not previously aware that there were also DIN standards for radio faceplates.)


- Paul, WB5AGF


ref> https://www.din.de/en/about-standards/din-standards

I use an RSP1A as an integrated modular part of a bigger system, in this case a roll-around test equipment cart. The cart contains an HP signal generator, dual trace oscilloscope, frequency counter, multimeter, onboard dedicated PC, wideband RF noise source, and storage for probes & cables. The PC uses Windows 7 and runs various electronics programs such as calculators, function generator, and also the SDR software. The RSP1A is used as a spectrum analyzer and it works very well for that once the amplitude reading is calibrated. Since there is no "real" spectrum analyzer software yet available for these, the closest I've found is SDRSharp r1361 and so that is what is used here. The whole system works great and is a real time saver in our little electronics lab here.