Yesterday (8/10) SDRplay released their new software for their "RSP" line of SDR's, which has been in development for years. I want to say that they first teased SDRuno 2.0 (as they originally were planning a major upgrade, not an entirely new app) way back in 2018, but that's just going by memory, but the thing I remember for sure was that they promised it would be cross platform and not just for Windows based PC's. So this has been a long time coming.
As is usual with SDRplay, they aren't saying much about where they're going with this or what an official SDRconnect 1.0 is going to have (and not have). But the preview edition is there to install and play with and I've been running it for about a day with my RSPdx SDR.
When you first launch it, you might be forgiven if its appearance reminds you a great deal of SDRsharp. It has a similar dark color scheme, a similar layout, and a similar way of having sidebars and control windows appear and disappear. Right now they seem to have made things very simple so gone are a lot of seemingly hundreds of settings you can play with in SDRuno. I for one didn't use many of them, and really am enjoying the relative simplicity where it seems like they focused on including the most used controls. However, one thing that currently seems to be gone are the adjustable notch filters. That's a huge thing, especially for someone like me who lives in the city and has all kinds of little annoying spikes all over the band. It's one thing I'm pretty certain will be in the full version when that's ready.
I'll briefly touch on the layout. It's quite intuitive with buttons that have labels that make sense (e.g. the gearwheel for settings) but will also have popups telling you what they are when you hover the mouse over them. There's a button that toggles a sidebar, which contains four rows of controls which then can expand or contract with a click. This is where most of the controls live. One thing of note is something labeled only as audio limiter with only on or off as the possible settings - if there's a way to adjust it I haven't found that yet. I find it must be on, otherwise it outputs an enormous roar of noise that's just intolerable.
One of the positives is that it can run a very wide spectrum (up to 10 MHz) with ease. SDRuno always struggled with that, and in general I got used to going with a maximum of 2 MHz at any time. But, as with SDRuno, the wider the setting, the harder it is to pick out individual signals. You can just click on them though and adjust the frequency if you're slightly off. But that leads to two major criticisms that I hope will be changed.
One is that the display colors are very dark, and right now you have fewer settings to adjust them. There's no contrast setting, for example, just visual gain. The other is that there's no way to key in a frequency. You have to hover your mouse over the numerals and scroll. Even the up and down buttons on your keyboard do nothing. Good luck to those who only have a trackpad to work with.
When you first launch it, it defaults to AGC and there another setting engaged which locked IF gain after you turned off AGC. I can't remember what it was, but those are things I like to control myself. It can overload and give you spurs galore all over the band if you're not careful (though again I'm in the city and not terribly far from a couple of different 10k AM transmitters), but they're easily adjusted. I think this is a big improvement over SDRuno.
Right now, there's a bug where if you close the app and relaunch it later, it won't be on the same frequency as the one you left. It's usually not far off but it's a bit annoying. The app has to be properly closed for settings to be remembered - if it crashes then it will be whatever it was the last time it closed properly. But that's to be expected.
Right now none of the SDRuno plugins work with SDRconnect, but they have a plan to get those working. I don't know how that affects third party plugins though, as they advise anyone with questions about those contact those developers rather than SDRplay.
I've got a lot more to do but thought I'd share some first impressions.
Topic: A few observations about SDRconnect preview (Read 1568 times)