I've had the FDM-S3 a couple of weeks, and physically it is a totally different beast than for instance the SDRPlay RSPdx or Airspy HF+. For better - and for worse. Here are my first impressions of the Italian flagship.
I've had the FDM-S3 a couple of weeks, and physically it is a totally different beast than for instance the SDRPlay RSPdx or Airspy HF+. For better - and for worse. Here are my first impressions of the Italian flagship.
8 comments:
Thanks for such a honest review Bjarne,and l hope Elad will reach out and sort the power reboot issue.Spec wise, for me money,l would have liked to see better dynamic range but the main draw l guess is the large bandwidth coverage
Bjarne, nothing happens when I press on the link (05:00 UTC 11 April)....Walt
No link to an article.
Working at my end chaps
In case there was an error with the Dropbox link, I have moved the article to Box.net and increased the size of the link text.
To comment on two of your points. I've compared mine to both my Sony XDR-F1 and a home brew TEF6686 based tuner and with the preamp on the S3 is just as sensitive as both of them. Unlike the S2 no external preamps are required for it to match hardware BII tuners or other SDRs.
I've not had to reconnect either power or USB to my S3 since I installed it, not for a reboot, software crash or even following a mains failure. It just works and shows as an Elad Sampler, FDMS3 in the device manager but I don't know why we are experiencing different experiences.
If only a downconverter could be marketed for the 888-MKII that could bring wideband 16 bit coverage to a much bigger audience. One exists as as prototype but I don't know of any plans to produce it commercially.
Paul
Paul,
I tested this extensively yesterday evening. Although a reboot seems to go ok, a power off always required the FDM-S3 to be powered off, and on again. I compared with the RX888 - some people didn't have any problems with the RX888, but I had on several PCs. The problem with the RX888 of course is that there is no way to power it down apart from disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable.
I've got both my S3 and RX888 connected via PCIe USB 3.1 cards (in seperate PCs), primarily to keep the radios on their own USB controller and in my case it also cured an isolation problem I was having with the RX888. They have the option to 'disable device' from within device manager, I wonder if a disable then re-enabling of the controller would regain access to the SDR? It's far from an ideal solution but might be an option for remote systems.
Paul
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