Hi Chuck, Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
You've hit the nail on your head in your RSPduo assessment! Performance-wise I find it's NOT in the ballpark of the "upper tier" of consumer SDRs. The promised Holy Grail feature of software phasing remains for developers to decide if the market is large enough to warrant their efforts to add coherent tuners for phasing. An SDRplay representative recently said it's not close on their radar, and that's why they've decided to make the API open source. Hopefully someone will pick up the ball and run with it, and deliver on what would be a killer feature--if it works well! Last week I made a day trip to Ocean City State Park, specifically to compare SDR models on weak daytime signals. Ocean City, WA is well away from strong RF, as is Grayland. Below is a summary I shared with some others: *I went to Ocean City State Park for a few hours, specifically to test the RSPduo, FDM-S2, and HF+ receivers on weak daytime medium wave signals. The antenna used was the Wellbrook ALA1530LN Pro, and all radios were operated with SDR-Console V3 fed from a single 4-way antenna splitter. All coax from the splitter to receivers was identical lengths of the same type of cable. This way the only variables were the SDRs themselves...all modes, bandwidths, etc. were the same.* *My key takeaways, specifically related to MW weak signal performance:* *The FDM-S2 gives excellent reception, that in my past experience equals or out-performs a Perseus SDR *except* in strong signal areas (Perseus has more built-in band pass filters to help protect the front end). Some others have noticed the S2's "edge" over Perseus at times, too. * *AirSpy HF+: I knew these are over achieving SDRs for the price, but Friday's careful comparisons proved their outstanding performance! My HF+ receivers always equalled the FDM-S2. That's really saying something! NO attenuator or gain adjustments on the HF+ are needed; it handles large signals extremely well. If you dive far enough into settings you *can* make adjustments but it's not needed.* *The RSPduo trails the pack significantly, with generally noisy reception and "fiddly", complicated to adjust gain/attenuation settings for best reception. I think the radio is great for the hobbyist with interests on different bands, but except for the potential of eventual phased (coherent) tuners in future versions of the software, there are better choices for the MW DXer. That said, the RSPduo is the best performing SDRplay product yet. Caveat: I may not have adjusted gain settings optimally on the RSPduo before recording with it at Ocean City. However, at Grayland with this radio and a 160 ft. DKAZ antenna I did little adjustment and found that I was hearing the same DX the other fellas were hauling in. The radio didn't seem noisy in that situation, either. My gut feeling though is that the RSPduo is not a top tier SDR like the others. It's very good for the price (plus the two tuners inside) but not up to the DX ability of the Elad or AirSpy.* *(Interestingly, with ALL FOUR receivers recording WAVs, the total CPU usage was just 6.7% and the GPU usage (nVidia CUDA graphics card) was 75%. Wow, 6.7% CPU with all radios recording full-bore?! I'm very pleased with the horsepower of this "new" Dell workstation laptop.* So Chuck, I've taken a lot more words to summarize what you stated so well. The RSPduo is not a top contender but worth considering if a DXer wants to cover a lot of other bands too. 73, Guy On Sat, Sep 1, 2018 at 6:41 PM, Chuck Hutton <[email protected]> wrote: > Guy: > > > I'd be curious about your overall impression of the RSP Duo. > > > I also own one andf came to the conclusion it can't match the HF+ or > Perseus. I consider its main value to be the promised (bit not yet > delivered) support for phasing / nulling. > > > Chuck > > > _______________________________________________ IRCA mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: [email protected]
