My experience with the Radioberry so far

[Todd Buiten]

I very much appreciate all of the hard work that everyone has done on Radioberry, so please don't take my comments as being critical of anyone's individual efforts. You all are great!

I love the *idea* of the Radioberry. The current state of the project, however, leaves it unusable for me. Here's why…

1. Hardware is a problem. Johan has said that he doesn't want to have to deal with hardware, but I can't find a reliable source for the boards otherwise. I bought an AURSINC board off from Amazon and I'm glad that I did because I can easily return it. It didn't work. It's clear that someone (perhaps the seller) reworked the board, presumably to straighten out the SMA connectors. But there is at least one missing solder joint and burn marks on the TX connector. The seller claims that it's a beta5 board, so it's supposed to be the latest and greatest. And reading comments from other Radioberry users here, I'm likely going to need to pull out my magnifying glass and soldering iron to get the board working. This alone stops me from moving forward with Radioberry
   
   
2. It seems that running the full stack on the RPi is not a priority. But just because you *can* run an SDR remotely doesn't mean that you *should*. I had a hard time getting any SDR package to run on the RPi. I finally got piHPSDR running, but not after a lot of effort. It crashed on me repeatedly until I found that different sites had conflicting instructions on i2c settings. Once I did get it running, all I could see was a roughly 1KHz section of the band with a useless waterfall underneath. I played with multiple settings to no avail. At this point I can't be sure of either my software installation or hardware, making debugging difficult at best
   
   
3. Everything runs far too hot with the RPi 4. Since this is a known issue, I won't go into detail. I should be able to solve much of this on my own. But what that tells me is that the current draw for the entire stack is far too excessive for a 100mw output rig

Maybe if I was more of an experimenter then this would be a good project. Sadly, I am not. But someday I am hoping that someone decides to tackle these issues and bring the Radioberry to its full potential. I can see so many good uses for this style of radio and I hope to see it mature into a usable system

Thanks again for what you're doing here. I really hope to be able to add Radioberry to my stable of radios someday

[Anthony N1IG]

thank you for the honest review!   I have been thinking about getting one, but had some concerns about just how well it worked with the RPi. 

I'm retired on a fixed income, and can't afford to be on the bleeding edge of technology anymore :(

so once again, thank you!

Anthony - N1IG

[Ronald Nicholson]

Just to report an alternate experience:

The Radioberry I purchased off of Amazon (so I could return it if it had issues) worked right out of the box.  I inspected the PCB beforehand, and although all the soldering wasn't optimal, it was good enough.

The software that I had for my Hermes Lite 2 (on both my Pi 4 and my iPhone) worked as is with the Radioberry after installing it and the radioberry drivers on my Pi 4.  The only issue I has was the the radioberry driver release build did not work, but the development build did.  (perhaps the builds should be relabeled?)  There are tons of set up options in SDR software, but that's actually a feature of SDR technology, not a bug.

The currently available ICs needed for an affordable direct sampling HF radio all seem to run hot (burn a lot of power in Rx, nothing to do with Tx).  Same with the Red Pitaya, KiwiSDR, and other direct sampling SDRs, etc.  I don't think that there's much that can be done about that today unless you forego direct sampling, or have a NASA-sized budget.  Raspberry Pi 4's can also run hot when running any math intensive software, not just SDR code.  I put a huge heatsinks on my Pi 4's.

If you want better heat-sinking and more than 10 mW Tx, Hermes Lite 2's from Makerfabs are reportedly back in production.  If you don't want to be "on the bleeding edge", Ettus, Yaesu, Icom, and Flex (et.al.) all manufacture more mature SDR products (for a much higher price, of course).

73,

Ron

[Gwen Patton]

My Radioberry that I ordered from AliExpress arrived today in good condition. I checked it over and see the same sort of barely-acceptable soldering, so I may test it first then hit it with the hot air station to flow some of the more questionable connections a bit better. A touch of flux and a bit of extra solder, and they'll probably flow out just fine. Hopefully I'll be up for working on it sometime soon. I can never tell when I'll feel up to it these days.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

73,

Gwen, NG3P

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[softerh...@gmail.com]

Hi Group,

The radioberry is a great project, especially for experimenters. I've read this list for years now, and there have been previous posts from happy, successful builders and users of the radioberry. Johan is a very capable and talented developer. He developed the tight integration with the raspberry pi, Cyclone 10 gateware ports, juice board for USB interface, modular setup, just to name a few. I would hope experimenters are not turned away by the negative review in this thread. Sure there are areas for improvement, but that is an opportunity for those who wish to dig in and get their hands dirty.   

In a previous post, Johan was surprised to see units for sale on Ali Express and other places. I don't think he planned that, or gets any remuneration from sales. He does this as an enjoyable hobby not a job. But still the traffic and support burden on this list have increased. People shouldn't expect a finished product. This is an open hardware and open source project meant for experimenters.

73,

Steve

kf7o