Friday, December 22, 2017

New Toy: SDRPlay RSP1A

First 10 minutes of use: Not bad for USD 100. Setup was ok, I chose to use HDSDR and when default setup was chosen, it was up and running. I needed to push LNA all the way up (which turned out to be UP towards zero!) for best sensitivity though.

Speaking of which: Not at the Perseus level, but not too far behind. Here's an audio file from KLAM Cordova Alaska 1450 with a relatively strong interfering signal on 1449. RSP1A is set up with USB, 2.7 kHz bandwidth. The Perseus is also set up with USB, but 3 kHz bandwidth. Antenna: 340 meters long beverage directed towards western North America. When I tested on KHKA Honolulu 1500 (below), the difference in sensitivity was noticeable with KHKA having audio and being partly readable on the Perseus. The RSP1A could only barely hear audio.

For sure not an SDR to replace the Perseus-grade SDRs. The price-performance ratio is good though.

More as it happens.



4 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for your review as I have just thinking of buying one.

Anonymous said...

Hi Bjarne, I seem to have best performance on hf with a RSP2 via low IF mode and 200KHz decimation. I also set the local oscillator to at least 10KHz away from the working freq to get to a cleaner part of the LO phase noise wise. Another idea is to make sure no nr dsp is on, nor that the rf nb is set too high and is causing distortion, IF nb has shown little to no signal improvement over no IF nb, but when strong sigs aren't present IF nb may be handy. As well I set the IF gain to lowest in manual mode and do not use automatic tuner agc. This allows for highest sensitivity to be cranked in with the least likelihood of imd arising. When not watching multiple channels in the hf band, I prefer HDSDR as the sdr control app, otherwise I use sdr console due to the very low cpu usage compared to SDRuno. I dearly love SDRuno and use it on occasion because it's lovely and the audio is excellent.

Thanks for all your reviews.

Chris

M .Van Driessche said...

Hi Bjarne, nice to get back to. I've been back after 5 years. Had my license radio amateur, but the band is now dead on HF, my Perseus sold sorry and stupid from me, but I bought the RSP1A, for my Kenwood 590SG. It works supper. I still had place in the garden, why not make a Kaz antenna. Now from this week I am back on the MW, and the conditions are not bad for September, the RSP1A is of course no Perseus. But price comparison is he certainly not bad, what does occur is sometimes small signals carriers where there is no dx with the Bias-T is this something better but they do not disappear completely. But I'm going to buy a Perseus again. A great hobby, he radio happen hi. I still hear from you, thank you for your commitment to hobby 73, Maurits from Belgium

Bjarne Mjelde said...

There is one Perseus on ebay right now.