Odd SDR behaviour on USB 2.0 ports only

[LD723]

If I have any sdr's connected to a usb 2.0 port, the sdr's water display on any program such as sdrsharp, sdr trunk, and others dont move if I dial in a frequency but if I drag left and right and move on the water display say in sdr sharp to move the frequency, it works but if I adjust the frequencies up top, the water display doesn't move and acts as if I haven't changed frequencies. Non of this occurs on the 3.0 ports. The 3.0 ports work perfectly but I get more interference spikes on the 3.0 ports.

 

[KB4MSZ]

I wonder if the USB 2.0 circuit is either overloaded or weak for some reason.

 

[LD723]

I wonder if the USB 2.0 circuit is either overloaded or weak for some reason.

I only have basics plugged in like keyboard, mouse, headset then the 2 sdr's and thats it pretty much. It may be a chipset thing because it never happened on my old computer with an older amd phenom cpu. My current is a ryzen 5 cpu

 

[KB4MSZ]

Since it's not a big expense, I would buy a powered USB hub and plug everything EXCEPT the SDR into the hub. Leave the SDR in the computer USB socket, the less it is connected to the better. If that doesn't prove any better, then plug the SDR into the hub as well. At least that way you will know it isn't a power issue.

 

[GTR8000]

My current is a ryzen 5 cpu

And that is the problem. There are USB issues with some Ryzen CPU's, in particular the 5 and 7. Do a Google search and you'll find plenty of results, including some specific mentions of the RTL dongles.

 

[lwvmobile]

I've got a similar type of issue on my new AMD build using an ASRock B450M-HDV R4 board and Ryzen 5 2400G. It seems to be a documented issue with USB issues on the AMD board set, not quite sure how far the rabbit hole goes, but on mine I have issues with devices plugged into the front USB 2.0 headers, but the USB 3 directly connected to the board seem to work fine with my dongles (for now).

AMD recently had a wide spread report about issues with the newer 550 boards, but seems like there are spread out issues across a lot of AMD based systems caused by anything from voltages on the USB, using PCIe4, and general voltages/clocking and so forth. When I have more patience, I'm going to dig through my own BIOS settings and try to nail down the voltages, settings and so forth. In the meantime, I'll probably just keep my old Intel Xeon Workstation around as a file server/SDR thing since its never had the type of issues I'm having now.

I knew about the potential for these issues going in and building a new computer, but I needed something for gaming, video production, and Blender/Godot stuff, so I'll use the one I have now for that and keep my old one for SDR. Now all I got to do is find a decent video card without breaking the bank. Damn scalpers.

 

[KB4MSZ]

 

[GTR8000]

SDR# - Issues with NooElec / RTL-SDR.com on new Win10 PC

HI All I'm running into a huge problem that I've been trying to find a solution to for the entire day. If you don't feel like reading, this video describes my issues I just built a new computer to run some SDR projects. This PC was built for this and I think Murphy has his hands in this...

forums.radioreference.com

 

[LD723]

I've got a similar type of issue on my new AMD build using an ASRock B450M-HDV R4 board and Ryzen 5 2400G. It seems to be a documented issue with USB issues on the AMD board set, not quite sure how far the rabbit hole goes, but on mine I have issues with devices plugged into the front USB 2.0 headers, but the USB 3 directly connected to the board seem to work fine with my dongles (for now).

AMD recently had a wide spread report about issues with the newer 550 boards, but seems like there are spread out issues across a lot of AMD based systems caused by anything from voltages on the USB, using PCIe4, and general voltages/clocking and so forth. When I have more patience, I'm going to dig through my own BIOS settings and try to nail down the voltages, settings and so forth. In the meantime, I'll probably just keep my old Intel Xeon Workstation around as a file server/SDR thing since its never had the type of issues I'm having now.

I knew about the potential for these issues going in and building a new computer, but I needed something for gaming, video production, and Blender/Godot stuff, so I'll use the one I have now for that and keep my old one for SDR. Now all I got to do is find a decent video card without breaking the bank. Damn scalpers.

Yeah it seems like its only usb 2 ports acting weird with the sdr's. Damn I also did not know that the ryzen 5's and 7's caused issues in that aspect with the sdr's but at least the interference spikes I get on the usb 3 ports aren't terrible.

 

[LD723]

SDR# - Issues with NooElec / RTL-SDR.com on new Win10 PC

HI All I'm running into a huge problem that I've been trying to find a solution to for the entire day. If you don't feel like reading, this video describes my issues I just built a new computer to run some SDR projects. This PC was built for this and I think Murphy has his hands in this...

forums.radioreference.com

Yep that's exactly my issue I wish I was more active on the sdr threads lol. It seems its only the usb 2 ports giving me those issues front and back thankfully the usb 3 ports doesn't do that

 

[GTR8000]

AMD Investigating USB Connectivity Issues with Ryzen PCs

AMD breaks out the magnifying glass

www.tomshardware.com

AMD Suggests Possible Fixes for Ryzen USB Connectivity Issues

Here, give this a shot

www.tomshardware.com

AMD Finds a Fix for Ryzen's USB Problems, BIOS Patch Coming in Early April

Plugging in the fix

www.tomshardware.com

BIOS Updates Arrive to Fix AMD Ryzen's USB Connectivity Issues

The update is slowly rolling out

www.tomshardware.com

 

[LD723]

I have a Ryzen 5 1600af to be exact just for an fyi with an MSI A320M-A PRO mobo

 

[GTR8000]

Hopefully the updates AMD issued to manufacturers will actually fix the issues. W2LIE solved the issue by simply installing a PCIe USB board and stopped using the onboard USB chipset altogether, but that's not a very elegant solution, especially when you've already spent good money on a motherboard that should be more than capable of supporting these devices.

 

[lwvmobile]

I should note that my 'solution' was to just plug a powered USB 2.0 Hub into one of the back USB 3 ports. I don't particularly need to hub, its just to only use one of the ports for multiple dongles. The issue I was having before was that in Linux I was getting
rtlsdr_demod_write_reg failed with -9
r82xx_write: i2c wr failed=-9 reg=06 len=1

along with 'couldn't change/tune freq' can't remember the exact verbage when plugged into any USB 2.0 port, but it was fine when using USB 3 ports. The dongle would work with USB 2.0, but when attempting to change frequencies it would give me an error. Also, on the side, just plugging in my SDR into the front USB 2.0 port makes my WiFi dongle drop out, so I'm sure that's a related issue. I did read somewhere about somebody fixing their particular issue by upping the voltages, but when I attempted to use the powered hub on the port, it didn't fix anything. I think its just some garbo AMD spec that apparently motherboard vendors and AMD have either turned a blind eye towards for quite a while, and are only now forced to have to fix it with a new AGESA 1.2.0.2, which to be honest, a lot more AMD board chipsets than those mentioned could probably benefit from. I imagine some jank code or flaw has been in it for quite a while and it probably only got worse on the new boards.

 

[lwvmobile]

Also, I should quickly mention I did go into UEFI BIOS and attempt to make all sorts of changes related to the clock frequency, voltages on the core and SOC, GFX, etc etc, and when I thought I had found a stable overclock that would let me boot all the way up, the first thing I noticed is that the front USB 2.0 port would immediately drop out (mainly the WiFi dongle) so its definitely tied into the CPU clock/voltage/etc the only problem is is that on a lot of boards, it seems like the stock settings (in my case I wasn't overclocking anything until I started looking into this) cause the issue, and adjusting frequencies and voltages to find the magic setup didn't work for me, but only made my problem worse, but because it made it worse, I believe some people when they say they FOUND the settings that worked for their specific case. Too much of a pain in the ass in my case, so I just give up on fixing it and just live with it

 

[merlin]

I use USB3 ports without any problems. My nesdrT barely works on USB2.
Speed and timing issues no doubt.