radiosonde auto rx with RTLPlay 1B

[Bert Thuiswerkplek]

Good morning,

I use Radiosonde auto_rx v1.8.1 on Raspberry Pi and a RTL-SDR V3 dongle.

Now I intend to buy a RTL SDRPlay 1B to replace the RTL-SDR V3 dongle.

One of the differences between the two SDRs is the ADC. The SDR V3 has an 8 bit ADC and the SDRPlay has an 14 bit ADC

Will SDRPlay 1B work with Radiosonde auto_rx?

Thanks for your response.

Kind Regards,

Bert van der Zwaan, PE1KZU

[Mark Jessop]

Hi,

I responded to the same question that you emailed to me directly, my response was a follows:

The SDRPlay devices are not supported directly. They use very different drivers to the RTLSDR, and even more annoying, the drivers are closed source.

There is *some* support for the SDRPlay devices via ka9q-radio ( https://github.com/projecthorus/radiosonde_auto_rx/wiki/KA9Q%E2%80%90Radio-Setup-Notes ) however this support is not maintained. Note that using KA9Q-Radio requires a RPi 4 as a minimum.

If you are planning to replace your RTLSDR, then i'd suggest going with an Airspy R2, as these are much better supported.

73

Mark VK5QI

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "radiosonde_auto_rx" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to radiosonde_auto...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/radiosonde_auto_rx/84353539-58a0-43f0-af78-4422e2e9a628n%40googlegroups.com.

[Bert Thuiswerkplek]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your quick support.

I am sorry that I have not found your DM, so thanks for also responding in this group.

Anyhow, your response saves me a lot of money.

Have a nice evening.

73,

Bert van der Zwaan, PE1 KZU

[Phil Karn]

Yes, SDRplay has a closed API. You have to run an opaque binary blob to use it, and it consumes a lot of CPU time. Who knows what it does. I suspect it converts a real A/D stream to complex. This is unnecessary in KA9Q-radio as I just feed the A/D to a FFT, which can handle a real input just as easily as complex. In fact I do exactly this with the Airspy. It also has a library that converts real to complex but I was able to bypass it with Airspy’s help. In fact, they suggested it. I would much rather have people patronize a helpful company like that instead of giving money to secretive outfits that don’t seem to care much about Linux or third party developers anyway.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/radiosonde_auto_rx/0d45743e-8017-4074-a062-77a6acb028c6n%40googlegroups.com.