SDRTrunk - p25 decoder test release

[cpetraglia]

I'm adding SDR Play RSP1 support after I change over to a new channelizer architecture. The current channelizer is generating/processing way too much sample data. The new channelizer should reduce the amount of data that it's processing and memory requirements. From what I've read so far, the RSP1 lets you select from a range of sample rates, up to 8 MHz. So, you could run the RSP1 at a rate that your processor/memory can handle.

Have you tried running airspy at the 2.5 MHz sample rate? If your motivation for the airspy was more bandwidth, have you tried running multiple RTL dongles to cover the bandwidth? Another option might be a multi-boot setup where you can select the OS at boot time. I don't know if it's possible, but maybe you can install Win 10 32-bit and the 64-bit side by side?

Denny

I'm thinking about the multi boot idea. That wont be that hard to make happen. I suppose I'll have to pay Windows, maybe not, who knows. I don't like the idea to have to re-boot to get to something quickly. I am going to order a few more dongles. My local system uses 6.5 Mhz meaning I would need three at roughly 2.88 each. I have no clue how to set that up. I would actually need 4 if I wanted to dedicate one to the control channel.
Probably just wait for the RSP support.
I want to thank you again for all your help. I see SDRTrunk as the best SDR trunking software yet.

Chuck

 

[DSheirer]

I'm thinking about the multi boot idea. That wont be that hard to make happen. I suppose I'll have to pay Windows, maybe not, who knows. I don't like the idea to have to re-boot to get to something quickly. I am going to order a few more dongles. My local system uses 6.5 Mhz meaning I would need three at roughly 2.88 each. I have no clue how to set that up. I would actually need 4 if I wanted to dedicate one to the control channel.
Probably just wait for the RSP support.
I want to thank you again for all your help. I see SDRTrunk as the best SDR trunking software yet.

Chuck

The control channel and the traffic channels all share the same tuner or set of tuners. Even though the channels of your system may span 6.5 MHz, you may find that it's split into 2 chunks with a gap in the middle. In that case, you can get by with 2 tuners, one feeding the lower set of frequencies and a second feeding the upper set of frequencies.

There's no special setup needed for the tuners other than to make sure they work and they have the PPM and gain adjusted correctly.

For each of the channels you have configured and enabled, and for any traffic channels that get dynamically created, SDRTrunk will ask each tuner if it can feed the channel. If it finds a tuner then the channel is started.

 

[br0adband]

You'd be better off with 4 RTL sticks if you have that much bandwidth to cover because they are unreliable at anything over 2.4 MHz sampling rate - yes they technically/theoretically can provide up to 3.2 MHz but none of them ever do, and most of them can't even reliably provide 2.5 MHz because of dropped samples that just gets worse as you raise the sampling rate. At 2.88 MHz you'll probably end up dropping over half of them and for pure digital signals that's just not going to work for you at all, even the 2.5 MHz would cause a lot of decoding issues.

So, stick with the 2.4 MHz sample rate, get 4 of them, and you're covered or 5 if you must dedicate one for the CC.

 

[cpetraglia]

You'd be better off with 4 RTL sticks if you have that much bandwidth to cover because they are unreliable at anything over 2.4 MHz sampling rate - yes they technically/theoretically can provide up to 3.2 MHz but none of them ever do, and most of them can't even reliably provide 2.5 MHz because of dropped samples that just gets worse as you raise the sampling rate. At 2.88 MHz you'll probably end up dropping over half of them and for pure digital signals that's just not going to work for you at all, even the 2.5 MHz would cause a lot of decoding issues.

So, stick with the 2.4 MHz sample rate, get 4 of them, and you're covered or 5 if you must dedicate one for the CC.

What if I want to get three more of the one I am currently using. It works well and was rated the best in a comparison of the cheap sticks. (RTL2832U R820T3 TXCO) Would they all show up or confuse each other? Is there a way to change the SNs so they would all work independently?

Thanks, Chuck

 

[br0adband]

Most newer RTL-based sticks work without issues because the Zadig drivers were updated in the recent past to accommodate more than one stick - by design they all tend to have the same device ID so the newer versions of the Zadig driver now can handle that and a random device ID is generated for each one. The issue is you have to figure out which one is which if you plug in a bunch at the same time; they won't show up as device 1, device 2, etc - the first stick may show up with something like 00000001 but the rest of them will have completely random sequences of digits in the device ID.

I have two sticks and the first one is 00000001 and the second one shows as 6&6F0C48D&0&3, just as an example, so they're pretty easy to discern from each other - I labeled the sticks with a small piece of Post-It Note with Scotch Tape to hold it in place as well - that's in Unitrunker. In SDR# they show up as 0 and 1 under the Device options, so each particular SDR application will have it's own way to discriminate between them I would imagine.

Either way you should not have an issue with multiple sticks plugged in, no.

 

[cpetraglia]

Most newer RTL-based sticks work without issues because the Zadig drivers were updated in the recent past to accommodate more than one stick - by design they all tend to have the same device ID so the newer versions of the Zadig driver now can handle that and a random device ID is generated for each one. The issue is you have to figure out which one is which if you plug in a bunch at the same time; they won't show up as device 1, device 2, etc - the first stick may show up with something like 00000001 but the rest of them will have completely random sequences of digits in the device ID.

I have two sticks and the first one is 00000001 and the second one shows as 6&6F0C48D&0&3, just as an example, so they're pretty easy to discern from each other - I labeled the sticks with a small piece of Post-It Note with Scotch Tape to hold it in place as well - that's in Unitrunker. In SDR# they show up as 0 and 1 under the Device options, so each particular SDR application will have it's own way to discriminate between them I would imagine.

Either way you should not have an issue with multiple sticks plugged in, no.

I am actually emailing back and forth now with Airspy. He seems to think he can get it working with a different driver. I did tell them I wanted to return it if they could not get it working. We'll see what happens.

Thanks

 

[cpetraglia]

I'm adding SDR Play RSP1 support after I change over to a new channelizer architecture. The current channelizer is generating/processing way too much sample data. The new channelizer should reduce the amount of data that it's processing and memory requirements. From what I've read so far, the RSP1 lets you select from a range of sample rates, up to 8 MHz. So, you could run the RSP1 at a rate that your processor/memory can handle.

Have you tried running airspy at the 2.5 MHz sample rate? If your motivation for the airspy was more bandwidth, have you tried running multiple RTL dongles to cover the bandwidth? Another option might be a multi-boot setup where you can select the OS at boot time. I don't know if it's possible, but maybe you can install Win 10 32-bit and the 64-bit side by side?

Denny

I finally got Airspy running on a new install Win 10 64Bit. Running at 2.5 MHZ no problem. Nice decode an follows the system fine minus the missing bandwidth. When I switch to 10 MHZ, about 15 seconds it locks up with same errors. Memory problems. I am utilizing the full 8GB of memory and task manager says at the time of lock up { CPU 13% Mem 340 MB} That includes everything that is running on a bare OS. Nothing else installed.
Don't know if I can ever use this Airspy to it's fullest potential.

Chuck

 

[appalachianscanner]

I finally got Airspy running on a new install Win 10 64Bit. Running at 2.5 MHZ no problem. Nice decode an follows the system fine minus the missing bandwidth. When I switch to 10 MHZ, about 15 seconds it locks up with same errors. Memory problems. I am utilizing the full 8GB of memory and task manager says at the time of lock up { CPU 13% Mem 340 MB} That includes everything that is running on a bare OS. Nothing else installed.
Don't know if I can ever use this Airspy to it's fullest potential.

Chuck

If there's a way to delay the processing.... same results in SDR# if you have your AUDIO> "Latency" very low....it takes a lot of horsepower to process everything closer to real-time.

 

[cpetraglia]

If there's a way to delay the processing.... same results in SDR# if you have your AUDIO> "Latency" very low....it takes a lot of horsepower to process everything closer to real-time.

Your asking the wrong guy about that. I do know that the Airspy was designed with SDR# in mind. I cant get it to produce any decent audio. It's choppy and distorted. My biggest problem was loading a working driver. All I've read says it's plug and play. NOT I spent 4-6 hours trying to get it working. It is now working barely, however I have never had this much trouble with a simple device. Opinion: NOT WORTH $200.00. I was emailing back and forth with Airspy and they just disappeared.

I wish you the best of luck.

Chuck

 

[DSheirer]

I finally got Airspy running on a new install Win 10 64Bit. Running at 2.5 MHZ no problem. Nice decode an follows the system fine minus the missing bandwidth. When I switch to 10 MHZ, about 15 seconds it locks up with same errors. Memory problems. I am utilizing the full 8GB of memory and task manager says at the time of lock up { CPU 13% Mem 340 MB} That includes everything that is running on a bare OS. Nothing else installed.
Don't know if I can ever use this Airspy to it's fullest potential.

Chuck

Chuck, sorry to hear that you're having such trouble getting it to work.

When you were watching the task manager at the time of lockup/out-of-memory, was the sdrtrunk Java process using 13% and 340 MB of memory, or were those figures for something else?

If it was for sdrtrunk, 340 MB sounds like a small value for memory - I wonder if Windows is not allocating enough memory for the java process for some reason. With 8GB of physical memory, windows should be able to allocate, and java should be able to use up to 4GB when it's the only process running.

Were you able to run airspy's USB bandwidth measuring tool, and if so, what did it say was the average USB throughput for a 10 MHz sample rate? (airspy.com > Quick Start Guide > Troubleshooting PC performance problems).

 

[Ghstwolf62]

Simplicity might be a great concept, but an even better concept is innovation and features. Try and consider for one moment what Denny has done (the countless hours of time researching, coding, etc). It might be a pain not to have single-click access to all the goodies, but you should expect it and attempt to do it. We can't expect everything to be handed to us [and for somebody else to take all of the risk], especially when it's being delivered for free.

Mike

Mike this was not an attack on him. I really liked his software before he upgraded it and it became unusable on my machine. I kept hoping new versions would address the issue that came up but the newer ones I can't even use.

His is not the only program that I'm talking about. Some of us are older and don't know computers that well. It is difficult if not impossible for said people to make use of something that we can't comprehend.

I had a heck of a time with DSDPlus and I can remember using DOS commands back in the early 90s to do everything too. I finally figured it out but it wasn't easy and the best thing to have happened was the plug in on SDR# which made it simple as pie.

I can say I can't use DSDPlus to its fullest potential simply because I do not understand enough to do so. It works for me with what I can understand but there are a number of things I see that I can't do.

Also as I said a long while back I'd be willing to pay for a GUI for any of these programs but no one seems interested in providing one. I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is on this.

I'm sorry if I offended anyone as that was not my intention. I simply can't use this and other programs out there because they require knowledge far beyond what I have. Making something easier to use would only benefit all of these programmers IMHO.

I'll drop it though and just wish him and others good luck.

 

[cpetraglia]

Chuck, sorry to hear that you're having such trouble getting it to work.

When you were watching the task manager at the time of lockup/out-of-memory, was the sdrtrunk Java process using 13% and 340 MB of memory, or were those figures for something else?

If it was for sdrtrunk, 340 MB sounds like a small value for memory - I wonder if Windows is not allocating enough memory for the java process for some reason. With 8GB of physical memory, windows should be able to allocate, and java should be able to use up to 4GB when it's the only process running.

Were you able to run airspy's USB bandwidth measuring tool, and if so, what did it say was the average USB throughput for a 10 MHz sample rate? (airspy.com > Quick Start Guide > Troubleshooting PC performance problems).

Denny, It was the totals for CPU and Mem at the time of lock up. What I finally did was get a clean install of win 10 64bit, installed on a new SSD drive, added a USB 3.0 expansion card with aux power connector and dedicated this to my dongles. It is a 4 port so they all are separated. When I now run SDRTrunk, It will run forever on 2.5 MHz, but when I switch up to 10, it goes longer than it did before but still locks up. I will say that on 2.5 with one other dongle I am getting excellent decode with voice. I have ordered another dongle to cover the 6.5 Mhz I need. And I still haven't heard back from Airspy. They gave up on me.

Chuck

 

[mtindor]

Understood. I'm quick to defend Denny and anybody else who provides these tools for us for free / nominal fee. Guys with this kind of talent are / should be making 100K+ a year. The last thing I expect from them is to take ownership of issues that i don't have evidence of being their issue. My Airspy works just great with Denny's app, running at 2.5 or 10 msps. Given that, the issue has to be one with either the computer, the USB interface, the drivers of the Airspy or the Airspy itself.

I do tend to believe the issue you are having with the Airspy and Denny's app is not related to Denny's app. I could be wrong, I'm not a programmer. But having used the Airspy in various environments, I do remember the hoops I had to jump through to get my computer to play well with it. In my case it wasn't an Airspy issue but rather an issue with the default USB 3.0 drivers shipped with Windows 7 (and now Windows 10) not being adequate -- I had to specifically determine the chipset of my system and then go to the manufacturer's website (in my case Intel) and download the Win10 drivers for USB 3.0 and install them. Since I've done that I've not had a single issue.

Did you run the throughput tests on your system per the link (to Airspy's site) that Denny provided which tells you how to test your USB port for proper performance? If you haven't done that, you really should / need to.

As for many of us being older and/or just not real accustomed to having to get "down n dirty" with applications, when it comes to these free apps like Denny's, Unitrunker, Pro96Com, and DSD+ it really is something that we all need to do. These are all ever-evolving pieces of work [with maybe the exception of Pro96Com, which seems pretty refined at this point]. Since they are ever-evolving and in some cases in their very infancy, we all have to be prepared to do work on our end to make them work.

Also keep in mind that despite your willingness to pay something / pay more for particular features, for some of these programs being developed, the developers may actually be operating on the virge of legality (or at least scrutiny) and as such really have no desire to make thing more difficult for themselves by then accepting money for the work. So we [the general public] need to learn to make use of the tools that have been provided to us.

That's just my take. Not mad, irritated or anything else. Hope you aren't either.

- Mike

Mike this was not an attack on him. I really liked his software before he upgraded it and it became unusable on my machine. I kept hoping new versions would address the issue that came up but the newer ones I can't even use.

His is not the only program that I'm talking about. Some of us are older and don't know computers that well. It is difficult if not impossible for said people to make use of something that we can't comprehend.

I had a heck of a time with DSDPlus and I can remember using DOS commands back in the early 90s to do everything too. I finally figured it out but it wasn't easy and the best thing to have happened was the plug in on SDR# which made it simple as pie.

I can say I can't use DSDPlus to its fullest potential simply because I do not understand enough to do so. It works for me with what I can understand but there are a number of things I see that I can't do.

Also as I said a long while back I'd be willing to pay for a GUI for any of these programs but no one seems interested in providing one. I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is on this.

I'm sorry if I offended anyone as that was not my intention. I simply can't use this and other programs out there because they require knowledge far beyond what I have. Making something easier to use would only benefit all of these programmers IMHO.

I'll drop it though and just wish him and others good luck.

 

[rts47]

SDRTrunk works perfectly for me but it does not follow traffic/voice channels from the control channel, i had to manually select the voice channels then it started to decode perfectly using the rtl-sdr dongle, i`m not in USA.

 

[DSheirer]

SDRTrunk works perfectly for me but it does not follow traffic/voice channels from the control channel, i had to manually select the voice channels then it started to decode perfectly using the rtl-sdr dongle, i`m not in USA.

Is the control channel on your system a P25 control channel or the older Moto Type II 3600-baud control channel?

 

[rts47]

Is the control channel on your system a P25 control channel or the older Moto Type II 3600-baud control channel?

Control channel shows p25 phase 1, i don`t really know if that could be Moto Type II 3600-baud control channel. Thank you.

 

[DSheirer]

Control channel shows p25 phase 1, i don`t really know if that could be Moto Type II 3600-baud control channel. Thank you.

Is the system that you're monitoring listed here on RadioReference? If so, can you post a link to it? Either way, sdrtrunk decodes P25 Phase 1 control channels but doesn't yet include a decoder for the older Moto Type II control channels.

 

[Ghstwolf62]

Understood. I'm quick to defend Denny and anybody else who provides these tools for us for free / nominal fee. Guys with this kind of talent are / should be making 100K+ a year. The last thing I expect from them is to take ownership of issues that i don't have evidence of being their issue. My Airspy works just great with Denny's app, running at 2.5 or 10 msps. Given that, the issue has to be one with either the computer, the USB interface, the drivers of the Airspy or the Airspy itself.

I do tend to believe the issue you are having with the Airspy and Denny's app is not related to Denny's app. I could be wrong, I'm not a programmer. But having used the Airspy in various environments, I do remember the hoops I had to jump through to get my computer to play well with it. In my case it wasn't an Airspy issue but rather an issue with the default USB 3.0 drivers shipped with Windows 7 (and now Windows 10) not being adequate -- I had to specifically determine the chipset of my system and then go to the manufacturer's website (in my case Intel) and download the Win10 drivers for USB 3.0 and install them. Since I've done that I've not had a single issue.

Did you run the throughput tests on your system per the link (to Airspy's site) that Denny provided which tells you how to test your USB port for proper performance? If you haven't done that, you really should / need to.

As for many of us being older and/or just not real accustomed to having to get "down n dirty" with applications, when it comes to these free apps like Denny's, Unitrunker, Pro96Com, and DSD+ it really is something that we all need to do. These are all ever-evolving pieces of work [with maybe the exception of Pro96Com, which seems pretty refined at this point]. Since they are ever-evolving and in some cases in their very infancy, we all have to be prepared to do work on our end to make them work.

Also keep in mind that despite your willingness to pay something / pay more for particular features, for some of these programs being developed, the developers may actually be operating on the virge of legality (or at least scrutiny) and as such really have no desire to make thing more difficult for themselves by then accepting money for the work. So we [the general public] need to learn to make use of the tools that have been provided to us.

That's just my take. Not mad, irritated or anything else. Hope you aren't either.

- Mike

Nope, definitely not.

It wasn't anything to do with Airspy. It was a Java issue. As in running it out of memory in less than a minute thereby locking up the program. He put in a fix which allowed it to run for maybe five minutes before doing the same. It just never worked after right after this one particular upgrade. I just use the last working version of the program to run.

I understand what you're saying but my computer knowledge is limited so being able to do programming and such is not in the cards for me. It just makes this and other programs unusable. OP25 sounds really nice but can't be used. DSDPlus is a wonderful program and I love it but again its not fully usable by me. I've got it to work enough to do what I need of it but not to its full capabilities. If I actually had anything besides P25 out here I'd be screwed beyond very basic functionality.

I also understand legalities and inherent restrictions that might impose. What I don't understand is if A, B and C can be offered in a complicated fashion like this and other programs then why can't the same be offered in a simple to understand and use GUI.

Again this may be to my admitted lack of understanding but I still believe the complicated stuff leaves out more than just me out of the equation.

I suppose its a rather moot point really as it is what it is and from comments elsewhere it doesn't look like its going to be changed.

 

[rts47]

Is the system that you're monitoring listed here on RadioReference? If so, can you post a link to it? Either way, sdrtrunk decodes P25 Phase 1 control channels but doesn't yet include a decoder for the older Moto Type II control channels.

It`s not on RadioReference. How can i check if its Moto Type II or not ?

 

[mtindor]

Thanks for the update. I would have never guessed it could be an issue between 32-bit/64-bit Java. hmm. That is useful information to know.

- Mike

Nope, definitely not.

It wasn't anything to do with Airspy. It was a Java issue. As in running it out of memory in less than a minute thereby locking up the program. He put in a fix which allowed it to run for maybe five minutes before doing the same. It just never worked after right after this one particular upgrade. I just use the last working version of the program to run.

I understand what you're saying but my computer knowledge is limited so being able to do programming and such is not in the cards for me. It just makes this and other programs unusable. OP25 sounds really nice but can't be used. DSDPlus is a wonderful program and I love it but again its not fully usable by me. I've got it to work enough to do what I need of it but not to its full capabilities. If I actually had anything besides P25 out here I'd be screwed beyond very basic functionality.

I also understand legalities and inherent restrictions that might impose. What I don't understand is if A, B and C can be offered in a complicated fashion like this and other programs then why can't the same be offered in a simple to understand and use GUI.

Again this may be to my admitted lack of understanding but I still believe the complicated stuff leaves out more than just me out of the equation.

I suppose its a rather moot point really as it is what it is and from comments elsewhere it doesn't look like its going to be changed.