You effectively just sold me one of these things. I've been using an RTL-SDR dongle with a random wire outdoor antenna for a while now. Discovered what I like doing the most is listening to shortwave and Hams on the ham bands, but I get the MW broadcast band splattering all over HF with the RTL-SDR. Filters have only been somewhat successful at stopping it. Just as importantly, I also use Linux these days. Since this SDR has good Linux support, it seems almost as if it's meant to be. So thank you for your video. I can't wait to get mine and start playing with it.
Thanks for this. It is a help. An update for you, Gqrx latest version (2.15.8) has the soapy library installed with it. One only needs to build the AirSpy driver. Everything works!
Nice to see that you are doing well and have a nice group of friends to live with out there in Oregon. Keep doing what you are doing so others may benefit from your knowledge. 73 from Bill WB9NYI Kenosha , Wisconsin
I've been using SDR's (6 of them in one PC) for around 18 months now and they are fantastic. I use them more than I use my radio's and with SDRAngel or SDR# and DSD+ for decoding digital they make a fantastic addition to the shack!
It is so easy to hunt signals with them that I also use the SDR more often than the radios. Also, this HF+ Discovery model seems to do much better at receiving the weak signals than even my Icom 7300 so far. It's better at handling strong local sources too. My neighbor will often check in to a few nets on 75 meters in the morning. His 80 meter loop is just 60 yards away from my antenna and he runs a full 100W. He desenses the receiver on my radios, but the Discovery doesn't even seem to notice him. I'm really impressed by that.
I found this video looking for reviews of the SDR (looking for something better than the RTL-SDR v3 which works but performs poorly compared to an mcHF) and ended up learning more features of Gqrx that will help me out. Thanks for your videos!
Had a thought about that first program you loaded. You mentioned it might be for the Spy Server. If so, then that might be related to a project to run this in Docker. Docker containers don't natively support GUI interfaces, so setting it up as a server makes sense. Especially if you don't want people trying to hack the computer you are running Spy Server on. If it's in a Docker container, they can't do any damage even if they crash it.
Good video Kevin! I have a different SDR but I can see the difference between them and also that GQRX is really easy to use! Many of the software packages I have tried for my SDR were a tad on the "have to study a week or two" to use... I had been waiting for one that would be intuitive as GQRX is. Thanks for all of your work! Enjoy your videos and your travels. 73! KK0DJ
Your video is the extra motivation I needed to upgrade my Ubuntu systems to 20.04. Been dragging my feet as 18.04 has been working so smoothly. I'm enjoying the new waterfall colors in Gqrx :-) Absolutely go with SoapySDR, everyone. It makes SDRs much easier to use with many sorts of software apps.
So far, I haven't had any trouble with 20.04. Everything's been working fine and some bugs that I noticed in software under 19.10 are fixed as well. It seems to be a pretty solid release.
There is a Compatibility layer for Linux that lets you run Applications compiled for the Apple Mac and is called Darling go to DarlingHq for the software, seems like some of your friends are playing with FreeDV which sounds like a encrypted audio communication package.
Hi Kevin ...Thank you for sharing information about SDR ... i am in the need to record the recieved signal strength as function of time like in a file having time stamps and signal strength... Do you know if this is posible ? Thanks Niels
I've got an RTL-SDR, which I use with Windows. It's a cute little gadget, but I have to admit I spend more time noodling about with my Ozark Patrol Regen receiver I built earlier this year!
The RTL-SDR is not sensitive below 70MHz, even with the direct sampling mod. A very poor performer if you're interested in HF. This little guy is super hot on HF.
A great demo thanks. I would be very interested in a video where you are transmitting on your rig and using this for receive, I'm interested in how you configure the T/P switching. Every one seems to use the MFJ switch, although good makes the SDR experience expensive.
I don't know what the specific advantage would be, for me, in doing so. My 7300 has a spectrum scope already and is just as sensitive as the airspy. At any rate, if I were going to do so, I'd use the keying line on the radio's acc connector to control a relay in an antenna switch box I suppose. I'd use a DPDT relay, one side switching the antenna, the other side grounding the receive antenna side to protect the airspy from RF from the TX.
@@loughkb Thanks for the reply and information Kevin. I'm awaiting delivery of a Xiegu G90 which I hope will allow me to use a connection via the rig. I'm a returning ham after a 30 year career and family break, so please excuse what must sound like an inane question. Keep making the videos, you are doing a good job. G6XIB
I noticed in the device config spyserver was missing from the options. You may still have to compile the racerxdl patch to connect to the spyserver network on GQRX. I've been trying it out connecting to a pi with an rtl-sdr with some success though it does work better on SDR#.
I see lots of opportunities for future "tune and talk" videos in here. Kevin, have you looked into setting up another audio channel in PulseAudio so we can hear you talk and also hear some clean audio routed directly from Gqrx?
The latter part of the demo segment where I was just tuning around the SW band was direct recorded on the computer with pure audio from the system. I didn't bother with grabbing and processing the additional audio track for the segment where I was talking since the focus there was the narration and the radio's audio was secondary to what I was talking about. (using the software)
Hello! Did you know that the AirSpy supports a 912 kHz bandwidth now? It's available through a simple firmware update you can download from airspy.com.
To bad the AirSpy device is not plug and play like the RTL SDR is. Is this your best usb SDR for Short Wave listing? Or do you and anything else that works better?
Thanks for another great video. Does GQRX have an auto-mute feature? I have a HF receive antenna hooked to my RTL-SDR dongle and a different antenna for transmitting. I have a MFJ relay to cut off the RTL-SDR but sometimes the software gets a hitch when transmitting. SDR Console has an auto-mute but it's Windows only. I'm looking for the same feature for Linux.
Not that I'm aware of. It might be possible to program a script to watch the state of a serial pin and mute the system audio when there's a signal there. If that's how you're interfacing to your radio.
I envy all the guys with those 120 ft antennas (oops, it probably sounded a bit wrong). I have Airspy HF+ Discovery, SDRPlay RSP1 as well as a few other SDRs, and on shortwave they all are nearly useless with a whip antenna. Interestingly, a good regular radio rather performs better on SW with a whip antenna than a fancy SDR, even though it costs a fraction of Airspy HF+ price.
Compiling source code is easy. That's the way you had to add in hardware support for hardware in Linux in the days of Slackware 23 years ago before yum and rpm.
How are wxWidgets related to SDRPlay? In short: they aren't. I guess they might have caused you trouble, because you've been using CubicSDR, which indeed depends on them. But SDRPlay works with SoapySDR framework (and hence with GQRX) equally well as Airspy HF+ does. So in fact your main issue was Cubic, not the SDR itself.
Yeah, I was referring to my scripts that auto-build Cubic for use with the sdrplay. However, I have had lot's of trouble getting the soapy module to work with the SDRplay since Ubuntu 18.
Did you upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using your Cell phone hot spot and if you did how long did it take. I have to do that and I am hesitant because it might take to many hours . I would like to get one of those SDR someday glad you did this now I know it works on Linux
Through my mifi hotspot. It's a lot of data, expect aroung 3Gig of download. I downloaded the cd image and did a fresh install to a new SSD in the laptop. Upgraded to make editing faster.
Like the spectrum and reception part of the video. The first half of the video is filled with jargon that I don't understand. API, Soapy, GQRX, Linux, et cetera. Is there a "for dummies" version of this coming for us Windows users? :)
I have several videos on linux that go far deeper into the subject. One of them is building fldigi from source. I walk through several of those things in tutorial fashion.
If you're on a recent release of linux, the airspy soapy module you can install with apt or synaptic will have support for the HF+ built in. Just install that module and it should work.
It can be built from source under linux using mono. SDR# is built on .NET, mono is a linux project that attempts to duplicate the .NET framework, but it's not perfect. I've had almost no success with windows projects built on .NET in the past.
Nope. I don't have one to use. But I can guess as to how you would do it. You would use the output to feed a signal, run that through the coil or trap and back into the input. Then measure insertion loss.
There are usually quite a few differences in the software available between fedora and other debian based distros like ubuntu. The thing I don't like about Fedora is Red Hat includes several binary blobs in their release that are not open source. Only they know what that code is doing and it can't be inspected by others. You just have to trust Red Hat and hope their code is clean and secure. Plus, they are known to cooperate with government requests for back door inclusion. (the only way they could get government contracts.) Linus denied their requests on the fully open source branches, but they have tried several times to submit code with back door access to the main kernel tree. There's a whole group that audits the main linux kernel source for such things and they catch such submissions with surprising regularity. I'll stick with debian based distros for now.
@@loughkb Don't use devices that do not have an open source driver, I'm not aware of any other binary blobs in typical distro kernels. As for backdoors, NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup inject intentional flaws that pass under the radar as regular code or they exploit the existing flaws. Vault7 is quite an interesting read.
Wow, so good it does HF coverage right down into the MF/LF bands and below! Marketing folks really need to have their bullshit checked by engineers. 😉 Great video as always. 👍
A question/comment not intended to be critical - I thought 14.300 marine maritime, was upper side band. May be why there was little to nothing on as you tuned it up. I'd love to have a good SDR, but it would have to be a complete Plug-N-Play as I don't speak or read Linux or any of its derivatives. Oh yeah, it would have bto be inexpensive (cheap). Good review and lesson. Keep them coming.
Linux is easier than learning CW, but at least on CW, _no one can hear you scream_ I deploy CentOS for all my client work. It’s the long term Redhat release with the commercial management software removed. Stable, easily managed and scriptable. Cuts my client support to a quarter of what it is with Windows and it keeps old hardware alive for another couple of years. You can download and install an ISO with a bunch of features without having to hit the terminal. All graphical installation. There are a few basic things you need to get your head around, in relation to packages and 3rd party software repositories, after that, you’ll almost replace windows for everything. My son has been using it since age 5 and has been managing and installing software on his own since age 8 I have some music production software I need to use an old version of Windows for. Everything else is all Linux.
in this day and age most people just want to use the devices... I am tried of the old DOS, Linux, windows plug and pray days. HAM software with plugins requires TLC. thanks. I wonder why the airspy and the like SDR software people do not update their software more like the hobby Arduino stuff it's not fantastic but even kids use it.
On the 20 meter segment, I had a brain fart while narrating, that's why I put the text overlay up to that effect. On the shortwave bands, I was using a sideband to hear a weak signal better, it doesn't matter which since it was an AM signal we were listening to. In actuality, when you do run across SSB on the shortwave band, be it military or automated weather transmissions, they are usually in USB.
I bought an AirSpy HF+ Discovery and wow it's hearing a bit more when connected to my end fed then my older SDR is.
Eye opening
You effectively just sold me one of these things. I've been using an RTL-SDR dongle with a random wire outdoor antenna for a while now. Discovered what I like doing the most is listening to shortwave and Hams on the ham bands, but I get the MW broadcast band splattering all over HF with the RTL-SDR. Filters have only been somewhat successful at stopping it. Just as importantly, I also use Linux these days. Since this SDR has good Linux support, it seems almost as if it's meant to be. So thank you for your video. I can't wait to get mine and start playing with it.
This channel is so interesting. I really like all of the stuff you explore here.
Thanks for this. It is a help. An update for you, Gqrx latest version (2.15.8) has the soapy library installed with it. One only needs to build the AirSpy driver. Everything works!
Nice to see that you are doing well and have a nice group of friends to live with out there in Oregon. Keep doing what you are doing so others may benefit from your knowledge. 73 from Bill WB9NYI Kenosha , Wisconsin
I've been using SDR's (6 of them in one PC) for around 18 months now and they are fantastic. I use them more than I use my radio's and with SDRAngel or SDR# and DSD+ for decoding digital they make a fantastic addition to the shack!
It is so easy to hunt signals with them that I also use the SDR more often than the radios.
Also, this HF+ Discovery model seems to do much better at receiving the weak signals than even my Icom 7300 so far. It's better at handling strong local sources too. My neighbor will often check in to a few nets on 75 meters in the morning. His 80 meter loop is just 60 yards away from my antenna and he runs a full 100W. He desenses the receiver on my radios, but the Discovery doesn't even seem to notice him. I'm really impressed by that.
I found this video looking for reviews of the SDR (looking for something better than the RTL-SDR v3 which works but performs poorly compared to an mcHF) and ended up learning more features of Gqrx that will help me out. Thanks for your videos!
Paused the video to give you a thumbs up for the comment, "i'm going to stick with Linux". 😀
Thanks for this, now got it running on Linux mint
Nice little gizmo..I flinched but will have to look up a price on one..thanks for that demo.
Gary in Mich
Had a thought about that first program you loaded. You mentioned it might be for the Spy Server. If so, then that might be related to a project to run this in Docker. Docker containers don't natively support GUI interfaces, so setting it up as a server makes sense. Especially if you don't want people trying to hack the computer you are running Spy Server on. If it's in a Docker container, they can't do any damage even if they crash it.
Good video Kevin! I have a different SDR but I can see the difference between them and also that GQRX is really easy to use! Many of the software packages I have tried for my SDR were a tad on the "have to study a week or two" to use... I had been waiting for one that would be intuitive as GQRX is. Thanks for all of your work! Enjoy your videos and your travels. 73! KK0DJ
Your video is the extra motivation I needed to upgrade my Ubuntu systems to 20.04. Been dragging my feet as 18.04 has been working so smoothly.
I'm enjoying the new waterfall colors in Gqrx :-)
Absolutely go with SoapySDR, everyone. It makes SDRs much easier to use with many sorts of software apps.
So far, I haven't had any trouble with 20.04. Everything's been working fine and some bugs that I noticed in software under 19.10 are fixed as well. It seems to be a pretty solid release.
Great video Kevin, and I’m inspired to have a play with Soapy SDR now thanks 👍
I like using a short piece of coax to transition from the SMA to BNC not as likely to break SMA it seems to me. Great video
There is a Compatibility layer for Linux that lets you run Applications compiled for the Apple Mac and is called Darling go to DarlingHq for the software, seems like some of your friends are playing with FreeDV which sounds like a encrypted audio communication package.
Hi Kevin ...Thank you for sharing information about SDR ... i am in the need to record the recieved signal strength as function of time like in a file having time stamps and signal strength... Do you know if this is posible ? Thanks Niels
I've got an RTL-SDR, which I use with Windows. It's a cute little gadget, but I have to admit I spend more time noodling about with my Ozark Patrol Regen receiver I built earlier this year!
The RTL-SDR is not sensitive below 70MHz, even with the direct sampling mod. A very poor performer if you're interested in HF.
This little guy is super hot on HF.
A great demo thanks. I would be very interested in a video where you are transmitting on your rig and using this for receive, I'm interested in how you configure the T/P switching. Every one seems to use the MFJ switch, although good makes the SDR experience expensive.
I don't know what the specific advantage would be, for me, in doing so. My 7300 has a spectrum scope already and is just as sensitive as the airspy.
At any rate, if I were going to do so, I'd use the keying line on the radio's acc connector to control a relay in an antenna switch box I suppose. I'd use a DPDT relay, one side switching the antenna, the other side grounding the receive antenna side to protect the airspy from RF from the TX.
@@loughkb Thanks for the reply and information Kevin. I'm awaiting delivery of a Xiegu G90 which I hope will allow me to use a connection via the rig. I'm a returning ham after a 30 year career and family break, so please excuse what must sound like an inane question. Keep making the videos, you are doing a good job. G6XIB
I noticed in the device config spyserver was missing from the options. You may still have to compile the racerxdl patch to connect to the spyserver network on GQRX. I've been trying it out connecting to a pi with an rtl-sdr with some success though it does work better on SDR#.
I see lots of opportunities for future "tune and talk" videos in here. Kevin, have you looked into setting up another audio channel in PulseAudio so we can hear you talk and also hear some clean audio routed directly from Gqrx?
The latter part of the demo segment where I was just tuning around the SW band was direct recorded on the computer with pure audio from the system.
I didn't bother with grabbing and processing the additional audio track for the segment where I was talking since the focus there was the narration and the radio's audio was secondary to what I was talking about. (using the software)
Hello! Did you know that the AirSpy supports a 912 kHz bandwidth now? It's available through a simple firmware update you can download from airspy.com.
Thanks for the heads up! That's an improvement worth doing.
To bad the AirSpy device is not plug and play like the RTL SDR is. Is this your best usb SDR for Short Wave listing? Or do you and anything else that works better?
I love it for shortwave and lower. It could even hear the 13.6khz signal from my metal detector.
Which antenna did you use?
Thanks for another great video. Does GQRX have an auto-mute feature? I have a HF receive antenna hooked to my RTL-SDR dongle and a different antenna for transmitting. I have a MFJ relay to cut off the RTL-SDR but sometimes the software gets a hitch when transmitting. SDR Console has an auto-mute but it's Windows only. I'm looking for the same feature for Linux.
Not that I'm aware of. It might be possible to program a script to watch the state of a serial pin and mute the system audio when there's a signal there. If that's how you're interfacing to your radio.
I envy all the guys with those 120 ft antennas (oops, it probably sounded a bit wrong).
I have Airspy HF+ Discovery, SDRPlay RSP1 as well as a few other SDRs, and on shortwave they all are nearly useless with a whip antenna. Interestingly, a good regular radio rather performs better on SW with a whip antenna than a fancy SDR, even though it costs a fraction of Airspy HF+ price.
I know the airspy is RX only, but does the discovery software support TX, or IQ signals for use with a transceiver like the rs-hfiq?
They recommend SDR# which is windows only, so I don't know if it supports TX with appropriate hardware.
Picked up an AirSpy HF+ Disovery. WOW replaced my RSP1a.
Compiling source code is easy. That's the way you had to add in hardware support for hardware in Linux in the days of Slackware 23 years ago before yum and rpm.
How are wxWidgets related to SDRPlay?
In short: they aren't.
I guess they might have caused you trouble, because you've been using CubicSDR, which indeed depends on them. But SDRPlay works with SoapySDR framework (and hence with GQRX) equally well as Airspy HF+ does. So in fact your main issue was Cubic, not the SDR itself.
Yeah, I was referring to my scripts that auto-build Cubic for use with the sdrplay. However, I have had lot's of trouble getting the soapy module to work with the SDRplay since Ubuntu 18.
Did you upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS using your Cell phone hot spot and if you did how long did it take. I have to do that and I am hesitant because it might take to many hours . I would like to get one of those SDR someday glad you did this now I know it works on Linux
Through my mifi hotspot. It's a lot of data, expect aroung 3Gig of download. I downloaded the cd image and did a fresh install to a new SSD in the laptop. Upgraded to make editing faster.
Like the spectrum and reception part of the video. The first half of the video is filled with jargon that I don't understand. API, Soapy, GQRX, Linux, et cetera. Is there a "for dummies" version of this coming for us Windows users? :)
I have several videos on linux that go far deeper into the subject. One of them is building fldigi from source. I walk through several of those things in tutorial fashion.
Why not use SDR#? That is what is recommended as per the printing on the side of the box...
As I stated in the video, I don't run windows.
My bad, for some reason I thought SDR# did have a Linux version.
Could not install soapy. got as far a cmake then got an error.
If you're on a recent release of linux, the airspy soapy module you can install with apt or synaptic will have support for the HF+ built in. Just install that module and it should work.
I wonder why Airspy doesn't have a version of SDRSharp for Linux?
It can be built from source under linux using mono. SDR# is built on .NET, mono is a linux project that attempts to duplicate the .NET framework, but it's not perfect. I've had almost no success with windows projects built on .NET in the past.
Kevin would the Air spy sdr radio work on win 7 please ,thanks
Sure. SDR# or any popular windows sdr software should support it.
Good stuff.
Hi can you shou me hou to huse a nanovna to test a coil or a trap with a video pleas.
Nope. I don't have one to use. But I can guess as to how you would do it. You would use the output to feed a signal, run that through the coil or trap and back into the input. Then measure insertion loss.
@@loughkb thanks
what is yr antenna please.?
Near the beginning of the demo segment, I put text up on the screen stating that it was connected to my 120 ft. doublet.
What no uhf?
I have a cheap RTL-SDR for the other ranges. This one is hot for HF, MW, and lower.
Fedora has airspyone_host in the repo.
There are usually quite a few differences in the software available between fedora and other debian based distros like ubuntu.
The thing I don't like about Fedora is Red Hat includes several binary blobs in their release that are not open source. Only they know what that code is doing and it can't be inspected by others. You just have to trust Red Hat and hope their code is clean and secure. Plus, they are known to cooperate with government requests for back door inclusion. (the only way they could get government contracts.)
Linus denied their requests on the fully open source branches, but they have tried several times to submit code with back door access to the main kernel tree. There's a whole group that audits the main linux kernel source for such things and they catch such submissions with surprising regularity.
I'll stick with debian based distros for now.
@@loughkb Don't use devices that do not have an open source driver, I'm not aware of any other binary blobs in typical distro kernels. As for backdoors, NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup inject intentional flaws that pass under the radar as regular code or they exploit the existing flaws. Vault7 is quite an interesting read.
Wow, so good it does HF coverage right down into the MF/LF bands and below! Marketing folks really need to have their bullshit checked by engineers. 😉
Great video as always. 👍
A question/comment not intended to be critical - I thought 14.300 marine maritime, was upper side band. May be why there was little to nothing on as you tuned it up. I'd love to have a good SDR, but it would have to be a complete Plug-N-Play as I don't speak or read Linux or any of its derivatives. Oh yeah, it would have bto be inexpensive (cheap). Good review and lesson. Keep them coming.
Linux is easier than learning CW, but at least on CW, _no one can hear you scream_
I deploy CentOS for all my client work. It’s the long term Redhat release with the commercial management software removed. Stable, easily managed and scriptable. Cuts my client support to a quarter of what it is with Windows and it keeps old hardware alive for another couple of years.
You can download and install an ISO with a bunch of features without having to hit the terminal. All graphical installation.
There are a few basic things you need to get your head around, in relation to packages and 3rd party software repositories, after that, you’ll almost replace windows for everything. My son has been using it since age 5 and has been managing and installing software on his own since age 8
I have some music production software I need to use an old version of Windows for. Everything else is all Linux.
Yep, that's why I put that text up on the screen at that point saying I had a brain fart and it was USB not LSB.
Welcome to the club, Kevin!
in this day and age most people just want to use the devices... I am tried of the old DOS, Linux, windows plug and pray days. HAM software with plugins requires TLC. thanks.
I wonder why the airspy and the like SDR software people do not update their software more like the hobby Arduino stuff it's not fantastic but even kids use it.
on 14 MHz he selected LSB and on 11,8 MHz hew had USB, both seem backwards to me. Ron W4BIN
On the 20 meter segment, I had a brain fart while narrating, that's why I put the text overlay up to that effect.
On the shortwave bands, I was using a sideband to hear a weak signal better, it doesn't matter which since it was an AM signal we were listening to. In actuality, when you do run across SSB on the shortwave band, be it military or automated weather transmissions, they are usually in USB.
Way to small bandwidth and I have no issue with raspberry pi and sdrplay...