SDR Recommendations

[Charles Albert]

I've been literally playing around with SDR using both GQRX (since finally abandoning Windows for good) and SDR# prior to that. I've used a number of different inexpensive dongles and black (well, blue, really) boxes found on eBay for very low prices just to get my feet wet and see if I like the concept.

Well, after a couple of years of playing, I've decided that I do like the SDR concept and have more or less fallen in love with GQRX, so it's time to move up the food chain a little on the hardware side of things.

I've put up a pretty good antenna farm, at least as good as I can with the space limitations I have and to get omni-directional coverage, consisting of three antennas to cover from around 400 KHz up to about 3 GHz with some overlap. I've got fair to good feedline in place as well.

The improved antennas made a huge difference in the performance of the cheap dongles, but I suspect they are now the weak link in the system.

I'm hoping the readers here can give a few suggestions on replacements for my eBay specials.

A few things I should say about what I would like to have:

1) Coverage from the AM-BC band to at least 2.4 GHz desired. I'm not opposed to more than one device to do this.

2) RX only. I have no desire to transmit at this time. If the price/performance is right, I would consider a TX/RX device but would not use the TX half with any likelihood/

3) Assembled only. My vision and shaky hands won't allow me to build a kit these days.

4) USB interface desired. I don't want to buy a $400 sound card as well.

Any and all suggestions would be more than welcome.

If possible, price and source info would also be great.

Take Care & 73

Charles

KC6UFM

[David Ranch]

Hello Charles,

You need to answer a few questions before the list can give you some recommendations.

First question:  What is your target operating system and version of that OS?  It can matter if it's Linux as some SDRs have closed-sourced drivers that you cannot compile yourself.

I've put up a pretty good antenna farm, at least as good as I can with the space limitations I have and to get omni-directional coverage, consisting of three antennas to cover from around 400 KHz up to about 3 GHz with some overlap. I've got fair to good feedline in place as well

What grade of coax did you run?  If you're really trying to use 3Ghz, you really should have the SDR up at the antenna and have a long USB cable (or USB extension using CAT5 wire) in place to minimize losses.  If you go that route, you'll need to figure out how to put your SDR into a weather proof enclosure, how to cleanly remote power it, etc.

1) Coverage from the AM-BC band to at least 2.4 GHz desired. I'm not opposed to more than one device to do this.

Are you against using upconverters?  The Airspy unit with a Spyverter works extremely well but if you want to then sample VHF/UHF, you have to disconnect the Spyverter unit.  The SDR-Play natively supports HF and thus doesn't require an upconverter but it has some compromises in it to afford that.

 

2) RX only. I have no desire to transmit at this time. If the price/performance is right, I would consider a TX/RX device but would not use the TX half with any likelihood/

There really aren't any inexpensive TX SDRs out there that have all the required filtering.  I would almost recommend using an automatic RX->TX coax switch and use a traditional radio for transmit.  Takes work to get the two radios aligned but it works pretty well.

4) USB interface desired. I don't want to buy a $400 sound card as well

If you want more than say 192Khz of bandwidth, you won't want an audio-based I/Q SDR anyway.

Do you have a specific goal of max simultaneous bandwidth displayed?   For example, the Airspy v2 can show 10Mhz wide
 
 

If possible, price and source info would also be great.

Since Gqrx uses GnuRadio as it's foundation, anything you buy needs to be supported there.  A lot of new SDRs keep coming onto the market so I'd be interested to see what else you find but if you buy bleeding edge, it might not have support in GnuRadio yet.  If support is there in the sources, you might need to be prepared to build GnuRadio yourself.  If you're not comfortable with doing that, then you probably shouldn't consider any of these brand new SDRs.  I took a stab at this a while ago and this might help you narrow some things down:

   http://www.trinityos.com/HAM/CentosDigitalModes/hampacketizing-centos.html#42a.picking-sdr-hw

This URL lists the basic pros/cons, price, etc.  I personally went with an AirSpy v2 with a Spyverter to run on a X86 laptop running Centos6 Linux.

--David
KI6ZHD

[Alexandru Csete]

Hi Charles,

My favorite HF receiver at the moment is the RFSpace CloudIQ:
http://www.rfspace.com/RFSPACE/CloudIQ.html

It's not cheap, but it is a really good receiver. In addition to
working as a standard IQ SDR, it can also run in "cloud" mode where
the box does all the SDR stuff and you can connect to it using a
lightweight client, including a client for Android (like websdr but
for DC-56 MHz). You can try CloudIQs running in this mode by
connecting to the publicly available receivers, including mine
CI000018: http://sdranywhere.com/cloud/sdrweb.py

The only downside is that the application for configuring the radio
and switch between IQ and cloud mode is only available for windows and
mac.

For VHF and UHF I use mostly the Airspy R2 and Airspy Mini. As David
pointed out, you can get a good upconverter for the Airspy and that
setup works very well on HF. In Gqrx you can create different
configurations so you don't have to change the settings all the time.

I think the Airspy goes up to about 1.7 GHz.

Disclaimer:
Both RFSpace and Airspy have provided me with free hardware, although
there was no requirement for advertisement. I really think they make
good hardware.

Alex
OZ9AEC

[Charles Albert]

Thanks for the info,  Alex. 

I'll have a look at those and make a decision soon. 

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