help with sdrsharp

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bailly2

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got a nooelec. can hear local fm radio station. nothing else. looking at the spectrum analyzer and the noise floor and i see strong signals so i click on it and i don't hear anything. please help
 

kb5udf

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What Mode?

There are alot of settings so a screenshot might help. Assuming the FM radio station sounds normal/good
then you must have selected WFM.

Click the NFM mode button and look around between 162.4 and 162.55 or so, and try one of those signals
which should be NOAA weather radio.

JB
 

bailly2

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i selected nfm.. tried noaa weather radio, tried trunking control channels, local fire channel. ...tried turning squelch off. nothing
 

bailly2

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oh ok. fixed it. it was the bandwidth. i guess it should be 12500 for 12.5 size frequencies
 

bailly2

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i have a nooelec e4000. now i know why these sdr are only $25, because they are absolute headache to configure.. dsd was working yesterday now it isnt, the source audio windows is not moving at all. it was working with vb cable using cable input from sdrsharp
 

morfis

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i have a nooelec e4000. now i know why these sdr are only $25, because they are absolute headache to configure..

Is the E4000 version so different to the R820T version (other than frequency coverage)? I use a total of twelve nooelec nesdr dongles (as well as others of different types including an old DVB-T E4000). Plug in and use....the only time there has been a problem is when windows reset the driver during a routine update. Months of flawless operation on fixed freqs and for searching/scanning.
 

br0adband

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There's a learning curve to everything and since the "cheap USB TV tuners" are nothing but radio receivers that need to be controlled by software (they had to use software to tune them and decode the data to provide the "TV" signal to the computer they were designed to be used with) then what that poster was basically saying is "I'm getting started with this stuff and having trouble getting a good understanding of it but I'll get there sooner or later..." but that's assuming that person doesn't give up. :)

Most people new to using physical scanners nowadays would consider them to be way way more complicated given you have some of them (the Whistler 1080 for example and some GRE models previously) that didn't even have a numeric keypad and were "pre-programmed" with frequencies for the entire US - that's all fine and dandy but those people would consider the process of picking the location they live in to scan with that pre-programmed information to be extremely difficult just the same.

If you're totally new to SDR-style monitoring where it's primarily a visual skill now more so where you get to see the radio spectrum instead of just a channel at a time than just twiddling a knob here and there or pressing a few buttons that's understandable but realize because it's a bit more complex than traditional receivers and scanners it's also vastly more capable as well - I can still to this day do things with a "cheap USB TV tuner" that cost me all of $11 shipped to my door that I can't do with a physical scanner that's $500+ like listen to 2, 3, 4, 5, even 6 different frequencies at the same exact time. Yes that's a bit much on the ears but, technically it's possible to do that with some SDR software like SDR-Radio/Console and using multiple VFOs all being fed from just one SDR tuner.

So, it's worth the time invested to learn how this stuff works, even if it makes you feel like ripping the stick out and throwing it at a wall sometimes - the stick is just a tuner, nothing more, so don't take it out on the stick, that's not where the problem(s) lie probably 99% of the time, it's the software that requires the time investment and there's a bunch of SDR applications available out there, each one different in it's own respects but they all tend to end up doing the same thing: providing you the software front end to define what the radio hardware is going to be used for.

You'll get there, bailly2, just have some patience till you have that "AHA!" moment so many of us have had when it all begins to make sense. :D

As for the E4000, the extended frequency range is the main benefit over traditional RTL-based sticks, there's not much else. The E4000 might be just a tad more sensitive and have a slightly lower noise floor but aside from that they're going to work the same as RTL-based sticks more often than not.
 
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bailly2

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thank you... i got vb cable installed. trying to use pdw to listen to acars, it shows two interfaces - soundcard and cable output. should it be cable input. ....sdrsharp audio is set to cable output. ..the signal strength meter in pdw has not moved once
 

morfis

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thank you... i got vb cable installed. trying to use pdw to listen to acars, it shows two interfaces - soundcard and cable output. should it be cable input. ....sdrsharp audio is set to cable output. ..the signal strength meter in pdw has not moved once

SDR# audio output should be to your 'virtual' input

Your decoder should be set to use the 'virtual' output
 

bailly2

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i can't get dsd to work and can barely hear the audio from websites. got the volume in windows sound settings and the volume for the websites all the way up.
 
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