SDR Dongles and Software

[Anonymous]

I am looking for the best combination SDR dongle and software for my situation. I live in the hilly and forested drift-less area in rural SW Wisconsin. My minimal shack consists of a Yaesu 100W FT-991A transceiver, Yaesu FP-1030A power supply, 40 foot high ZS6KBW HF flattop dipole antenna and a 25 foot high Comet GP9 VHF/UHF antenna (25 feet high at the radials). Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. 73, Duane KD9LIL

[Fred Kemmerer]

Hello Duane,

Thanks for posting your question. Can you say a little more about how you want to use an SDR dongle in your station? What bands would it be used on and what are your use cases for it?

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Fred. My intent is to scan for and/or respond to voice and digital activity on the 80, 40, 30, 20, shortwave and possibly the 15 meter bands. I do realize I will be constrained by the limits of my HF ZS6BKW dipole and Comet-GP9 VHF/UHF vertical antennas and my rural, hilly and tree covered location. I have done some research and know there are several dongle/software combinations out there but not sure what combination would work best for me.

[Jwahar Bammi]

Hi Duane,
I can recommend 2 combinations:
SDRPlay and SDRUno software
Airspy and SDRSharp Software + Scanner Plugin
both of the above combinations will give you the ability to monitor all the bands, even unattended to come back and later see what activities happened at various times of the day at your location using your antennas. Combine this info with WSPR and you get a very full picture of what bands are open when at your location using your antennas. For an example see this video of scanning with SDRPlay
https://youtu.be/jeaTwyp7UOk

For scanning i prefer the SDRPlay combo wit  the RSP Duo SDR because of the 2 receivers and i can scan HF and VHF simultaneously.

73 de k1jbd
bammi

[Hamilton]

Hello Duane,

I have played with $20 dongles up to a old Flex 3000 and a Pegasus. The best bang for the buck in my opinion is a SDR play.

The low cost RTL dongles use the chip set developed for TV cable boxes at UHF. Some have a over sampling converter to cover HF with marginal performance. A few have a actual up converter with somewhat better performance, but still marginal.

(The dongles are ok for VHG and UHF, just not HF)

A SDR Play like a RSP-2 has pre-selector filtering over various HF bands to reduce aliasing, a broadcast band overload filter, and covers 500kHz to over 1GHz. There is also a selectable pre-amp.

The software SDR play offers is SDR uno. I also like HDSDR which works with the RSP1. The software is free and includes Omni rig which permits the 991 to be tuned by the SDR display and the SDR to follow the 991.

I use it with my TS-590SG which has a built in T/R switch. I do not recall if the 991 has this feature. If not MFJ makes a box that works well.

The TS-590 is a top performing radio and the SDR Play hears everything it does.

I also use the SDR play for 2m and 70cm receive along with a IC-7100 for transmit to work linear satellites. This setup with the FT-991, SDR Play, SDR Uno, and SATPC32 would be very good for SAT work.

 

[Derek Sullivan]

There is another specific piece of of software called Win4YaesuSuite found at yaesu.va2fsq.com  I have been looking at that for a bit and may drop the $60 for it.   It allows you to use dongles to act as a panadapter and control your radio, FT-991As included.  I mostly for now use WSJT-X with my 991a because of mic-fright, but may plug my voice in someday.

[Anonymous]

Thanks to everyone for your replies. Your comments, level of detail and recommendations was exactly what I was looking for. 73, Duane

[Jwahar Bammi]

Derek,

I previously have used va2fsq’s Win4KX with my Elecraft radios, both using a dongle and also using the I/Q output from my KX3 via a soundcard to drive the Win4KX. While this works, it shows you the spectrum, and lets you QSY by clicking on the Spectrum, it is not great.

A much better option is to use your choice of SDR and SDR software like SDRSharpe/SDR Console/SDRUno which have way richer functionality, and then set up two way sync between your radio and the SDR software using CAT control. All of the above SDR applications support this functionality, and it is IMHO a much superior experience, including ability to look at a much wider swatch of the band, or even other bands.  You will need a T/R switch if you don’t already have one, or if your Xcvr does not have a separate  receive antenna input – for example aMFJ-1708B-SDR . Look for umpteen videos on YouTube that show you how to do this.  For example:
https://youtu.be/mGmoWoaek34

—
73 de k1jbd
Bammi

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