Patriot2120
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Airspy R2 vs RTL-SDR dongle vs RSP1A? What is the difference? I am currently running RTL-SDR dongle and I am wondering if Airspy R2 is better. Would RSP1A be better? Any input?
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Airspy R2 vs RTL-SDR dongle vs RSP1A? What is the difference? I am currently running RTL-SDR dongle and I am wondering if Airspy R2 is better. Would RSP1A be better? Any input?
What i want is a few things. Police scanner, Air traffic and Mililtary! If i can indulge in satellite reception would be a bonus! Just dont want to spend $1000 for that. If that makes any sense! And thank you for the reply, trying to learn all this stuff!It depends what you want to do. RTL-SDR is low end performance (though better than no SDR) and I will not go further about it. If you just want to do VHF/UHF (no HF), I would go with an AirSpy R2--the 8 MHz displayed bandwidth, when set to show that in SDRSharp, is a big factor.. If you just want HF and/or FM broadcast, AirSpy HF+ Discovery wins hands down. If you want to do HF/VHF/UHF in just one SDR, then go for an RSP1A or one of their higher models. (Yes, I own all of these and the above is from my experience. ) You did not mention software and there are several choices for each. SDRSharp and HDSDR are my favorites.
I have a gaming computer I am using for this so I know I have the PC power. I want to listen to Police, Air traffic and what ever else gets me in trouble! LOL I just dont want to spend $1K dollars for that! I like listening to different stuff!I dont have the PC power to fully use an airspy r2. You'll want more then the minimum hardware requirements listed on their site. I am considering giving the airspy mini a try. I have an rsp1a, love it, great on hf, great on everything really,Sdruno has lots of bells and whistles. Rtl-sdr blog v3 is my go too with SDRsharp, they are a great combo, less bells and whistles, best scanning plugin, quickly do what I want to do. If I find something I want to dig into and listen I switch to the rsp1a.
The rtl-sdr blog v3 was my first, my go too, but I like and use the nooelec nesdr smart v4 for my law/EMS trunk radio set-ups.
More important then which sdr, is the right antenna for what you want to listen to. 1/4 ground plane antennas are easy and fun to make, there is a great homebrew off-center Fed dipole on wiki.radioreference. I recently bought a tram 1410 discone antenna and got it up in the air, it's a great deal for $45 on amazon.
HF, now that is completely all about the antenna, I don't have allot of property space and no tall trees 😢 so I've had a 55 foot longwire with so so results, last weekend a neighborhood let me toss a wire in his tree overnight, tree is like 100ft Ish high, I got 150ft of wire about 3/4 the way up ,stretched it and hooked it to a bungee cord on my wall,hooked it up, wowser! There was some much more, it was a fun night
The RTL-SDR use no prefilters but the other two do, and they probably also have some stop filters like FM broadcast. The RSP1a uses a different receiver chip that are better than the other two.I am wondering if Airspy R2 is better. Would RSP1A be better?
There's some support for SDRPlay devices in DSD+. I use it with an RSP1 clone and a genuine RSP2. FMPP handles both of them.dsdplus support only airspy beside the RTL-SDR
I forgot to say if anyone does this that they will need to change the serial numbers on the two RTL-SDR.com dongles which is easy to do. Here are the directions:If you want to do trunk tracking, I have had my best luck using a couple of RTL-SDR.com dongles with the sdrtrunk software. The local system here covers about 8 MHz so I have to use two which is OK. The R2 audio is too garbled. Using two Minis for this keeps giving me USB errors. RSP1A is not supported with sdrtrunk. I only use the two RTL-SDR.com dongles for this purpose. Buy these either from their online store or their Amazon store, not eBay!
Because you go with what works best. For this situation, 2 RTL-SDR.com dongles work better than either the SDRplay RSP1a or the Airspy R2. It is easy to set them up.Im not very technical and have basic SDR knowledge. Why use two dongles and is it easy to set up say with trunk radio?
The only thing you have to do, is plug the other sdr in. It's suggested you change the serial number so you can identify if one dongle has an issue, but it's not required to my knowledge. If you want to do this, simply google "change serial number rtl-sdr" and you'll get a few guides on how to do it.How do i get 2 RTL dongles running at the same time? I only have one at present. What's needed or info on how to do this?