DBMandrake
Member
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2022
- Messages
- 15
I agree that SDR Uno just isn't very nice to use. Sure, it has most features of other software on paper but the user interface is the most convoluted and awkward mess I've seen and I certainly don't miss it now. (As it doesn't work with Airspy products and works poorly with my RTL-SDR device)
I'm still using the Airspy Mini and loving it. Because I was finding myself tuning into HF quite a bit on the RTL-SDR v3, but was fully aware of its limitations in direct sampling mode I decided to fork out for the Spyverter up converter - which can be used with both the Airspy Mini and RTL-SDR v3, (Or any SDR radio in fact, as it supports both Bias-T and USB power) and I've been very pleased with its performance. (Of course an Airspy Mini + Spyverter is a lot more expensive than an RSP1A, so certainly isn't the cheapest way to get HF and VHF/UHF coverage)
In fact I'm easily able to receive BBC Radio 4 way down on 198Khz with a small antenna in my window which didn't even show up at all on the direct sampling mode of the RTL-SDR. (which I think only goes down to around 500Khz)
On paper it seems like having to insert the Spyverter in the signal path for HF and remove it again for VHF and up would be a hassle compared to the single input on the RSP1A but in practice it isn't because any antenna that is half decent on HF is poor on VHF and visa-versa, so you're likely to have at minimum an HF antenna and a VHF and up antenna, in which case you just leave the HF antenna connected to the Spyverter and switch the Airspy between the VHF antenna and Spyverter. Without an upconverter you'd still need to switch antennas between HF and VHF anyway.
On the software side I've gravitated mostly to SDR Console as my SDR software of choice now - at least for analogue reception like SSB, AM, FM etc. This is particularly the case on HF as SDR console has some amazing neural network noise reduction algorithms which are fantastic on HF which none of the other packages I use have, a good noise blanker, a wide range of easily selected bandwidths for SSB/AM/FM etc, Synchronous AM, and also exalted carrier single sideband reception of AM signals which is great when one side of an AM transmission has interference.
The spectrum analyser is also very nice and very detailed, and I also like the Recording facility that makes it so easy to hit record and start recording the full IQ stream for later playback and analysis. In short its a really great piece of software.
Ironically I find myself hardly using SDR# now - that's not to say it isn't good, it is good and does most of what you'd need, and does have plugins such as the frequency scanner plugin which are quite useful, but I just feel more comfortable in SDR Console now.
SDR++ I like a lot too as it's so fast and efficient, and is probably a better choice on slower hardware than SDR Console, which is a bit more sluggish. On VHF and up SDR++ is quite nice, however it is lacking some of the features like the neural network noise reduction to make it great on HF.
SDRAngel is quite cool for decoding certain kinds of data like pagers but does tend to crash a bit and is not well suited for general tuning around like SDR Console.
So far I haven't come across any general purpose SDR packages that I feel I need to use outside of SDR Console, SDR++, SDR# and SDRAngel, so those are my picks...
