Who is #1 Sdrplay or Airspy? in performance, bang for the buck.

[ratboy]

People that point out the SDRPlay has no native shielding could just wrap the assembly in some aluminum foil as a stopgap el cheapo measure until more some effective comes along, or place it inside a small metal box as required with a hole on each side for the USB and antenna cables. If the SDRPlay can be easily opened (I have never seen one in person nor a disassembly of it so far) then perhaps one could line the inside of the casing with aluminum foil then tape it off to prevent any potential metal contacts from happening.

Anything that can provide some shielding is better than the bare plastic assembly, that's for sure, especially in an RF dense environment. Having USB cables with the ferrite chokes is a great idea as well, practically a necessity these days so don't go el cheapo on those ever - get higher quality ones and it pays off with better noise floors even considering how good the SNR tends to be with these newer SDR devices coming along.

Every little bit helps... and that saying in a world using hardware based on digital data processing and signals makes it practically ironic to say it.

Thanks for the reply.
I have some really thick aluminum foil that I've had saved for some reason, it's overkill to cook anything with, so it might work here, at least a little bit. I hope the SDRplay works as well as my old dongle SDR did at home, it was actually useful there. Here at work, the only scanners or receivers that work decently at all are the GRE/Whistler/RS PSR500/Pro-106/651

 

[ratboy]

I took my SDRplay home and fired it up on my desktop PC. It was much better than at work, I was instantly listening to a lot of SWBC and then several railband freqs. There was still a lot of hash from the USB cable, so I looked and found a cable I had that had a ferrite choke on one end. It cut the hash by about 30%, and I wrapped everything up with aluminum foil and the hash was down about 75%, to the point it was usable on weak HF signals and while it's still touchy about the cable being touched and handled, but it's a lot better I'm hoping the dual ferrite USB cable that should be here tomorrow will get rid of the last of it, or to the point it doesn't matter. On VHF it was great, with my attic discone, I had a lot of S. Michigan stuff coming in very nicely, better than my scanners by a good margin.

 

[br0adband]

Since you're a new owner of SDRPlay, can you do me a favor of sorts and do some monitoring of various things over the next few days that aren't shortwave related and provide a report of your experience and opinions. As I am planning to get either an SDRPlay or Airspy in the next few months I appreciate hearing (no pun intended) any reports or reviews from current owners. I'll admit I'm leaning towards the SDRPlay for a variety of reasons including the native HF support out of the box as well as the more sturdy USB-B type connector, and of course the lower price too.

I'm not a huge SW fan, never really have been but the fact that I could monitor HF stuff is a definite plus for the SDRPlay. As I tend to be a monitor of the civilian and military air bands along with the traditional VHF-Hi and UHF (400-512 and 750-950 MHz) that would be my primary concern with respect to the purchase: how well does the SDRPlay manage those higher frequency bands in terms of reception and sensitivity. Yeah, I know I can just look at the hardware specs to get an idea but, actual first-hand experience by current owners tends to trump a bunch of numbers on a page.

Anyway, I'd be appreciative if you can offer your opinions after a few days, or anyone else that cares to chime in. I've gone through this thread twice now and I'm still reading reviews on the SDRPlay as they crop up so this is still research till I make the final decision on which unit to purchase.

Thanks...

 

[mehdi_asgari]

I'm not a huge SW fan, never really have been but the fact that I could monitor HF stuff is a definite plus for the SDRPlay. As I tend to be a monitor of the civilian and military air bands along with the traditional VHF-Hi and UHF (400-512 and 750-950 MHz) that would be my primary concern with respect to the purchase: how well does the SDRPlay manage those higher frequency bands in terms of reception and sensitivity. Yeah, I know I can just look at the hardware specs to get an idea but, actual first-hand experience by current owners tends to trump a bunch of numbers on a page.


Thanks...

I took a look at the bands you mentioned.
The only voice that I could find and listen to, was for 404MHZ (our local airport which is about 8Km from my home)

 

[ratboy]

Since you're a new owner of SDRPlay, can you do me a favor of sorts and do some monitoring of various things over the next few days that aren't shortwave related and provide a report of your experience and opinions. As I am planning to get either an SDRPlay or Airspy in the next few months I appreciate hearing (no pun intended) any reports or reviews from current owners. I'll admit I'm leaning towards the SDRPlay for a variety of reasons including the native HF support out of the box as well as the more sturdy USB-B type connector, and of course the lower price too.

I'm not a huge SW fan, never really have been but the fact that I could monitor HF stuff is a definite plus for the SDRPlay. As I tend to be a monitor of the civilian and military air bands along with the traditional VHF-Hi and UHF (400-512 and 750-950 MHz) that would be my primary concern with respect to the purchase: how well does the SDRPlay manage those higher frequency bands in terms of reception and sensitivity. Yeah, I know I can just look at the hardware specs to get an idea but, actual first-hand experience by current owners tends to trump a bunch of numbers on a page.

Anyway, I'd be appreciative if you can offer your opinions after a few days, or anyone else that cares to chime in. I've gone through this thread twice now and I'm still reading reviews on the SDRPlay as they crop up so this is still research till I make the final decision on which unit to purchase.

Thanks...

No problem. The cable didn't show up today, even though it said it was in Detroit yesterday, so hopefully it will show up tomorrow. I normally avoid the AC (Sorry, they bore me to death) bands, but I will give them a listen and let you know how it does. It's already better than my PRO-197 on the VHF AC bands, by a slight amount. It seems to get better audio recovery in AM mode so AC comms are more understandable. Not a huge difference, but every little bit helps. I listened to a little while this morning to the 153-155 MHZ PS stuff and it was doing very well, equal to the 197, as long as I didn't touch the SDRplay, or the cable. If I even waved my hands near the cable, I could hear the background hiss go up and down out of the speaker. I may end up putting the SDRplay into a grounded aluminum box or something to try to get the noise down as far as I can. The cable I bought is supposed to be "Double Shielded". I hope that actually means something. Most USB cables I've taken apart are total garbage, like a lot of the "high end" audio cables sold over the years.

 

[br0adband]

One would almost think that some company should specialize or at least make some customized heavy shielded USB cables nowadays for these kinds of purposes. I have a few that I know are excellent in that respect based on testing: a Belkin 6' USB-B cord used for attaching a printer and another one that's 12' from Belkin as well and both of them are like 1/4" thick literally, not the typical 1/8" size you find with a lot of microUSB cables nowadays or even 3/16" for some typical USB ones. These things are great cables, unfortunately the only thing I have to attach them to is the printer/scanner/copier/fax thing I have.

I've been tempted to convert one or both of my RTL sticks over to using a USB-B connector which is vastly more stable and sturdy in terms of connectivity. I'm happy that SDRPlay decided to use that for the port connector and not microUSB so again, that's a big huge plus for the RSP in my opinion over the Airspy but that's just my opinion as stated.

I like most dread noise, and I know I have a lot of it even considering these traditional RTL sticks have a noise floor of about -60 dB and can't really do much better, but sometimes the levels in some bands are just crazy high for whatever reason. I use the sticks with a 8' USB extension cords that of course are not very well shielded but they have two ferrite chokes on each of them at the ends so that helps to a minor degree. I wrap the sticks in several layers of aluminum foil (the typical household stuff, nothing like that thick foil you mentioned you have) and that helps as well.

I also yanked out the shield cover on the RTL stick end of the cable and that made a dramatic difference in the noise floor overall - I read about doing that over at the SDR for Mariners blog which has a lot of great tips that you can do to reduce noise that don't really require a lot of expense or buying aluminum or metal cases to get the job done. I figure with the chokes and now detached shield from the USB extension cables I've done close to 10 dB of noise reduction overall, and as noted every little bit helps.

It'll be cool to get a proper and better performing SDR device here in the near future. I was about to buy up a few of the newer R820T2 + TCXO sticks to play with but I figured if I'm going to spend more money on this hobby I might as well get something a bit more capable so, at this point the SDRPlay is the winner by a decent margin on my pros/cons list vs Airspy.

Thanks for the report and I hope to read more once you get things situated to your liking.

 

[Flatliner]

Another big plus of the SDRplay is its "proper" USB port. Much more robust that the micro usb "phone" connections that are on the airspy. It also means that getting properly screened cables, is easy. This is one of the decent ones that I was able to easily know was screened well, just from the ebay image.. Try that on a micro USB cable!

http://s10.postimg.org/em6zk0pjt/dsa.jpg

 

[SCPD]

Flatliner. Same way i run mine.

 

[Flatliner]

Did you add the ferrite clamp, or was it present already? Mine has the rings already. It's great having the clear covering as I can see that the braiding also extends into the fully-screened plug housings and that (unlike another cable with supposed ferrite, but ended up being a lump of plastic) there is actually something inside!

 

[mehdi_asgari]

@Flatliner:
You can find shielded USB cables with ferrite inside, nearly everywhere.
Here's mine:
Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet

 

[vince48]

Flatliner. Same way i run mine.
View attachment 52403

Xeno194
can you see what the DBM or S unit difference is when you use a USB cable without the ferrite? I'm planning to get a SDRplay.
I'm trying to find a double ferrite cable for my Airspy, but want to make sure it's worth it. I have snap on ferrite cores, but when I attach them to the USB cable, I see no noise floor improvement.


vince48

 

[SCPD]

It all depends on the size and # of chokes you have on the usb cable. I would take an AM radio to find sources of noise vs using a million chokes. I can check for you. I know that my afedri's noise floor is in 120-125 range in HDSDR and the SDRplay is in 110-100 range also in HDSDR. I also run the gain a tad high on the Sdrplay. I'm waiting on my Airspy to come in directly from Youseff. Go ahead and buy the Sdrplay from HRO. If you don't like it you can return it but i can almost guarantee you will not return it.

It is that good.

 

[jonohudson]

Ham Radio Science view of best SDR

Here's Ham Radio Science's view..

Best SDR Radios of 2015 and 2016 (so far) | Ham Radio Science

 

[br0adband]

Not sure I'd agree with that Ham Radio Science review there in terms of their choice for "the best SDR" but that's my own opinion: while I'm sure that Elad unit is pretty nice, being so limited from just HF to 6 meters is a handicap that I personally just couldn't tolerate but then again I've never been a big HF/shortwave monitor myself. And considering for 7.5x less money ($149 vs $1149) and offering 20x the working receive bandwidth (0.1 MHz to 2 GHz vs 0.01 MHz to 54 MHz) SDRplay seems like a far far better device minus the transmit capability.

Surprised they didn't mention HackRF or BladeRF in there either considering what those devices are capable of as well. Seems more like they went with the cheap, not-so-cheap, and hella-expensive for their choices and there's a lot more ground that can be covered with what's out there.

But again, that's just my opinion.

 

[slicerwizard]

Here's Ham Radio Science's view..

But why should we care what some hammie thinks? RR isn't a ham website. It's probably quite safe to say that most RR members have little interest in the ham bands. Does DSD+ control/tune SDRPlay like it does Airspy? If not, it won't trunk track. That's what's important to *me* and it's completely off that reviewer's radar.

 

[mtindor]

But why should we care what some hammie thinks? RR isn't a ham website. It's probably quite safe to say that most RR members have little interest in the ham bands. Does DSD+ control/tune SDRPlay like it does Airspy? If not, it won't trunk track. That's what's important to *me* and it's completely off that reviewer's radar.

I concur. If I want to listen to trunked systems and various VHF/UHF digital stuff, then the Airspy is the no-brainer for me due to its direct support in DSDPlus and Unitrunker, as well as its very good performance and available bandwidth.

M