radiosonde auto rx with RTLPlay 1B

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Bert Thuiswerkplek

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Jan 19, 2026, 3:18:00 AMJan 19
to radiosonde_auto_rx
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

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Jan 19, 2026, 3:21:29 AMJan 19
to Bert Thuiswerkplek, radiosonde_auto_rx
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


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Bert Thuiswerkplek

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Jan 19, 2026, 3:28:21 AMJan 19
to radiosonde_auto_rx
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

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Jan 20, 2026, 11:03:53 AM (13 days ago) Jan 20
to Bert Thuiswerkplek, radiosonde_auto_rx
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.


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