Hi all,
in playing with soapysdr support to enable a wider range of radios I have become a little nervous about the ability of unknown drivers to crash all of spark, (not good if you are skimming with a a number of radios).
One thought I had was to run soapy in a separate process (.exe) for each radio so if one crashes spark is not affected. As an experiment I have implemented this but using the extio drivers used by HDSDR etc, this was a simpler way to test the idea as there is less inter process communication required than with soapy. One nice side effect of doing it this way is that both 32 and 64bit extio drivers can be used by 64bit spark.
I don't recommend using this if spark already has a driver for your radio or if there is a soapy driver. extio just doesn't allow as clean an integration as other methods. It is also windows only.
Radios that send the iq over audio are not supported.
It may work with Perseus and Elad radios, I would be keen to hear if it does.
To use create, a folder called SparkSDR in the windows Documents folder and in there two folders named ExtIO_32bit and ExtIO_64bit. Place your extio dll and any support files in either ExtIO_32bit or ExtIO_64bit depending on if they are 32 or 64bit ( I think most are 32 bit).
Run spark and enable experimental features in the main settings and then click discover.
73 Alan M0NNB