How many SDRs does SDRTrunk support

[Ulti P. Uzzer]

I put 5 SDRs on the new version of SDRT (never tried it on older vers) and it made the data messages slow way down and have terrible reception. I have them on a 16 core PC , on a 3.1 USB port and on a powered USB 3 hub, I also have heatsinks & a fan on them... Can anyone give any guidance on this?... I cannot find anywhere how many SDRs SDRT supports.

[Bote Man]

If the USB bus is congested or if all 5 dongles are served by the same USB hub I guess that could cause a bottleneck. It is a *serial* bus after all, so everybody has to wait in line for the slowest guy.

 

It’s like they tell new users of FreeSWITCH: there are too many combinations of hardware, dongle type, other software running on the machine, etc. to definitively state a universal limit.

 

 

Bote Man

http://www.botecomm.com/bote/radio/streaming.html

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[jim...@gmail.com]

I'm running 4 with zero issues on an i5 six core, 12g ram, Windows 11 Pro. All plugged into a hub that "can" be powered but I'm not running it powered.

[Jeff Thompson]

What's missing from this conversation is the sampling rate of the SDRs and the computer involved. I've gotten up to 30 MSPS across 3 SDR devices and I didn't have an issue on one machine, while even getting 10 MSPS on another (lower powered) computer may be a complete struggle.

So if someone says they have 5 SDRs running it's a hugh difference between having 5 10MSPS SDR devices vs 5 RTLSDR at 1 MSPS each. 

And are the devices sharing the same USB bus? Different busses? Sample rate? CPU type? # Cores? RAM? 

On one computer I have, I suspect I could get to 50 MSPS combined - if I had additional available USB busses, which I don't. But it has the CPU grunt to get there or even more. 

You'll know you've reached your computer's limited when either a) SDRTrunk tells you when it starts up or b) you run into broken up conversations and poor control channel decode when you didn't before. 

Note: in some cases I have gotten the complaint from SDRTrunk during startup but it has still performed well, but this isn't very common. 

If there are hardcoded limits I haven't heard of any. So far SDRTrunk has been able to handle anything the computer's been able to ingest. 

[Ken]

It this issue mentioned below the cause of the "WARNING: the combined data rates of tuner(s) on USB bus(es) above can potentially saturate or exceed the maximum USB 2.0 data rate of 480 Mbps..." error message that I often see on startup?

This error message mentions using other USB ports/busses; how do you go about changing what USB bus a tuner uses, assuming it is possible?

Ken

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[Bote Man]

Every motherboard + chipset combination is different, so there is no single answer. This is what we’ve trying to get across to the original poster.

 

In Windows 10 and later you can open System Properties and use the different views available in that window to plug and unplug dongles on each USB port to see where it populates. Just take notes and observe how many USB root hubs are shown and so forth.

I’m no expert, jdow is, but I’m sure she’s getting tired of repeating the broken record about USB issues. Maybe duck, duck, go searches are your friend? It’s not like this stuff is a well-kept secret.

 

But to repeat: there is no “one size fits all” answer when it comes to USB implementations. This is still a hobby and experimentation is part of the game. Get your fingers dirty and learn.

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